2 Bad Seagate 7200.10 320Gbs Drives?

I recently built the following machine:

Antec Sonata II case / 450W
Athlon 64 X2 5000
Asus M2N32 WS Professional
2 x 1Gb OCZ PC2-6400 Platinum
XFX 8600 GTS
2 x Seagate 320GB 7200.10 SATAII
XP Pro

everything running at stock, with latest bios and drivers.
One 120mm fan sucking air out of the back of case.

Initially I set the system up with one of the drives installed, everyting worked fine apart from a occasional chirping sound from the drive, after about two days the drive failed with windows reporting a disk read error.

I then installed the 2nd drive and reinstalled XP onto that, again I am getting a chirping sound from the drive and yesterday XP froze when entering the desktop.

googling the chirping sound and this drive model I found reports of similar experiences.
However I find it hard to believe I could have two bad drives! what other factors could be at play?

thanks.

I have 5 Seagate 320 gig drives... I got 1 DOA and got it replaced and then never had a problem.

I use to have a lot of problems with drives dying till i figured out why.. heat...
How hot is your drive gettting? (speedfan should tell you)
Is there any ventilation on it?
I try to keep mine below 40c and usualy have them ideling around 35c
if they are to hot... that would be a good reason why your having problems

In addition to temps, speedfan can monitor voltages. The PSU in the Sonata-II isn't that good. Mine only lasted 18 months which seems about par for this PSU.

I ran speedfan and the drive is averaging around 42-43c. SMART reports that the drive has gone up to 50c.

I ran seatools on a short test which it passed, I ran the long test overnight but the machine rebooted so I'm not sure what happened there.

I've bought a 2nd 120mm fan to mount behind the drives to suck air over them. Fingers crossed that will solve it.

I think I will look at getting a new PSU in the next 6 months - I'm tempted to get 2 x 8800GTS in SLI which will deffo need a better PSU.

klunking noises - some faulty PSU's will cause this where they cant supply enough power to the rails, seagate drives are real fussy with power (some cheap caddys will not work with seagates), faulty drives will klunk, and heat will ware out drives quicker, but with windows issues, the hdd can cause those issues, so can bad memory (not any klunking noises though)