Here is what really happened..... Goldie_Locks slapped some new 320Gig Hitachi MSL SATA drives in today to perform standard backups (going on the cheap after her recent fund raiser) and the crap couldn't take the random access writes.
SATA drives for laptops are good technological ideas; even for home WSs, this is true. But for an internet server, where I can have an Internet timing skew of a few milliseconds accessing and WRITING huge quantities of data between several concurrent users, it is absolutely the worst technical decision under the Sun.