In my case with the previous two drives, the hard disk drive controller seemed to be magnafoozled on both. Both drives were fine when I initially used them, and the first drive started failing after months of use. The second drive started failing after four or five days of use. This one has been fine for over a month now.
With the previous two drives, the behavior was erratic, but it was repeatable on nearly every boot. The system was slow: Mouse clicks did not respond immediately and sometimes took anywhere from 2-10 seconds to register, directory listings were slow to load, browser windows were the worst and just scrolling up and down a page could take 5-10 seconds for the scroll bar to even move, and when the scroll bar on the browser did move, it was often jerky. Also, VAIO Gate, one of the programs built in that loads on startup, would cause my mouse to hang, not move for a couple seconds, and then start to move from where it should have been based on the motion I used to move it. That behavior would go on for the first 15 minutes of boot, and perfmon showed a long disk queue length during that fifteen minutes. Once the disk queue length dropped down to 1-2, the system was manageable again.
Don't know if that problem will repeat with the new drive at some point, but I would care not to take chances and just get the board replaced at this point. Maybe it will fix the USB issue, too. They seem to be somewhat related.
