A couple things you can do to check the hard drive(s) is:

Run HDTune - This will tell you the read/write speed of your hard drives. It's free, decently fast, and it'll tell you some cool information. You can compare it here: Tomshardware.com

Run SpeedFan - It's a fan controller. This doesn't sound like it'd do anything to benefit you, but it will read S.M.A.R.T. data from your hard drive. You may need to run it as an administrator in Vista.

[align=center]Screenshot from SpeedFan (Click on "Perform an in-depth online analysis of this hard disk"):



Screenshot from SpeedFan's Hard Drive Analysis:

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