Gradual Hard Drive Failure

I have two matching Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 7200RPM ATA-66 30GB hard drives that I've been running for a little over five years now. Just last night, I was running into some problems with one of them - Windows 2000 was refusing to upgrade it to a dynamic disk, and kept giving me a LDM Configuration Write Error (iirc). So I copied all my data over to the other one and tried reformatting the first one - didn't do any good, but it's a good thing my data was able to copy over.

I downloaded and ran Maxtor's PowerMax drive-testing utility on the flaky drive, and I didn't find anything until I ran the complete test, at which point it reported that it had found bad sectors, the drive was failing, and gave me diagnostic code ce97917c. I then tried doing a complete low level format on the drive, which took half the night. When I got up in the morning, it had finished the low level format. Running another complete scan on it didn't turn up any errors this time.

So I rebooted into Windows 2000, and tried to write a signature to the drive in preparation for upgrading it to a dynamic disk and writing partitions to it. It wouldn't even write the signature. However, I was able to run Simpli Software's HDTach3 on both drives, and then superimpose the graphs. The results are interesting...


(click image to enlarge)

...Guess which graph belongs to the failing drive. :)