This will be my last post until the hard drive arrives tomorrow.

I've never seen a computer so slow........and still operate.

Took 15 minutes to open Firefox and another 2-3 minutes to make this last post...........

Thankfully, I managed to back everything up in Safe mode over the past 48 hours........dreadfully slow, but it's done.

The removed drive was a WD Caviar SE. The replacement drive is identical.

Dell sent the drive with all the drivers and software ready to self-load. It saved hours of work. I'm pleased with their support level (paid warranty support).

The machine was up and running in about one hour.

The new drive is functioning very well.

Some observations:

The machine definitely goes into standby mode and the drive shuts down. When returning to the machine, it takes about 10 seconds to recover and get the desktop displayed.

This is in stark contrast to the previous drive which did not shut down the drive, despite my numerous attempts to achieve same using the control panel and the various energy saver schemes.

I'd take a guess that the hard drive failure was caused by continuous use for two years...........

I generally leave my computers running 24/7 and seem to average about 3 years on a hard drive. Having one fail after two years is not surprising.

I leave this one running as well...........but, I really would prefer if the drive doesn't spin 24/7.

I don't know how to control that in windows. My macs have some controls to tell the drives when to spin down, especially the laptops. There must be some way to do that in windows.

IMHO spinning down wears the drive out faster. I have ALL of my drives in about 14 systems and 4 servers that I run set to never spin down or sleep. My oldest system has a 12 year old 8GB seagate in it, still works fine. In fact, 95% of the hard drives that I have had fail, were under a year old. Google did a huge study on this. If a drive makes it past the first 8-12 months it will generally last about 5+ years.

I've had many more western digitals failing in what comes into the shop at work than seagates recently. An HP I repaired yesterday had a dead Western digital in it, HP's replacement they sent was a Seagate.

Windows power management (especially Windows 7) has so many configurable options it is ridiculous.

My hard drives in the PC I am using right now (primary is a 74GB 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor, storage is a 1TB Western Digital Black) spin 24/7, no failures yet. The Raptor is almost 2.5 years old.....

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