So on a friends computer who likes to collect tons of internet pictures, and I mean a TON.... one of the hard drive is having problems. SMART says that the drive is fine with no reallocated sectors, read or write errors. The presence of the drive in the computer sometimes causes the computer to fail to post or boot. Absence of the drive allows normal boots. Chkdsk stalls at verifying indexes step at 0% and the drive partially spins down and spins back up about 10 times per minute (This spin down/up thing only happens on chkdsk or when the computer fails to post/boot). Extremely slow I/O operations.... only about 1.6 MB/s file copy rate. Currently copying all the files to a new drive since the back up is a few weeks old... and it's taking forever... 20 hours so far and about 15 more hours to go. The MFT is huge and I think it's pegged at about 10-12% of the drive, and the drive has over 450,000 files and is 90% full !
So the drive may be failing, but it's unusual because a slowly failing drive should have bad sectors and other kinds of errors. I also wonder if the power from the PSU isn't enough or something is wrong with the SATA power cord... since the problems started after moving the computer to a new location. After I backup all the files, I'll try some other hard drive diagnostic utilities, after switching the power to a different SATA power plug.