Hard Drive Bad Sectors

I pulled the old drive out and did a straight swap with the new one, then installed W7 on it. I also bought a caddy at the same time, as it makes swapping drives over so much faster

If you can find one let me know, almost nothing out of my entire armory of software tools seems to display PCIe bus speed infomation. The only other program I know that does is specific to Gigabyte motherboards.... you might try ASUS's motherboard utility software as that may offer it.

I have everything from a Maxtor, old Seagates, several Hitachi's (one of them an old refurb replacement for a 'Deathstar') to a Western Digital... except for a drive I killed none have never worn out or needed to be RMA'd other than the WD. These were old drives I used before I got a NAS, and most of them are now well over 5 years old. Excluding the external variety, HDD's should last a very long time so it's suspicious when just one of them goes. You have a good quality PSU though, so that wouldn't be it either..

If you still have or will use either of the hard drives you might consider running Spinrite on them. The program seems gimmicky but it's been endorsed and tested by some people that would know, and it does appear to work very well.

This is my first WD drive, so fingers cross this one lasts I've usually stuck with Maxtors and they have done well for me, but every IBM/Hitachi drive I've had has failed (about 4 in the last 10 years). To be fair, 2 of them were Deathstars

I'm going to run some of the tools on the UBCD (ultimate boot CD) tonight and see if I can clean the drive up .

I hate having to clean install, it takes me ages to make the OS just right.