I have a 7200.11 500GB, firmware SD15, OEM class, purchased around March 2008 has been running fine all along. Im thinking maybe its the configuration that triggered the firmware mess up? Anyway here is what happened to me: a) running on Intel ICH9R but in AHCI mode. Jumpered the drive to SATAII 3Gb mode. When transfering large files between drives, system slow down to a crawl and after a while back to normal. The cycle keep on repeating until the transfer completed. Event Viewer gave me a lot of errors something like "The driver detected a controller error on\Device\Harddisk0\D". The drive was jumpered back to SATAI 1.5GB mode and has been running fine since. Im thinking maybe the constant error in SATAII mode might confuse the SMART and eventually made it corrupted? On another issue, my SMART health has a warning on the over limit of START/STOP count status. Could it be an early sign to the SD15 death curse?