A 'lot of diffuse hardware problems' is a story too long to recite. I was
reluctant to upgrade to a BETA BIOS. When I did I thought I'd bricked the
machine. After a nights sleep, I realized the upgrade had reset to
defaults / PCI monitor rather than PCIe. Now hardware works perfect.
However, 500GB Seagate Barracuda says it has 30% life left. The red light
that indicates drive activity glowed too often.

The SMART table here can allow looking at individual parameters.

http://hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

That means the raw data field in the "Reallocated"
has gone non-zero. At a guess.

Paul

Thanks Paul,

Using that tool, '(05) Reallocated Sector Count' was displayed for the 500GB
Samsung EVO SSD, but not for the 500 GB Seagate Barracuda SSD. It's
connected to a different controller, a PCIe (x1) SATAIII card.