So I lost a second hard drive in the same way that the first died. I suspect now that the controller chip on the mother board was somehow damaged. This happened around the same time that I lost a stick of RAM and neighbours complained about damage to their electronics during a lightning storm.

So I've moved to an SATA drive, which is *knock on wood* doing pretty well so far. The only "downside" to the move is the new drive has a lot more space than the old drive, but due to the nature of clonezilla and dd ...