>>While pure HW/disc error probably would have shown up in OS error logs, perhaps this way failing components could be identified. As VM usage here is rampant, I would have no problem - no idea if Cyril uses them a lot.
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>Modern mechanical hard drives can fail weirdly. I've seen 2 cases which threw no event log errors, S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics were fine and everything ran without errors...eventually. By that I mean performance was somewhere between 1% and 2% of what it should have been. Machine boot time 30+ minutes etc. In both cases, replaced the hard drives and everything was back to normal. Surprisingly, both drives were "reliable" enough to be imaged (Windows 7 Backup/image) and the images restored to the new drives, but the imaging process took *forever*.

Sounds like the issues I encountered years ago when under XP access to failing hard disks was downgraded somewhat regularly to PIO on old IDE/ATA connectors - but I ***think*** this is not possible any more when HD/SSD is on SATA. But perhaps a weird combo/driver allowed such a thing.
Was a registry key - what else - but I do not remember exact names/values