Did my new PSU wreck my HDD?

[TheNewPCGuy]

I upgraded from an XFX 550W PSU to an Antec 650W today, and all of a sudden my 3 1/2 year old 500GB WD HDD has started to slow down significantly. The disk usage is constantly at 100% when I'm doing anything and the time the PC takes to boot up has increased. I also installed a new GPU today along with the PSU and cleaned out my old drivers with DDU.

I've tried different fixes that I know of to see if I can sort it out. Anti-virus/malware checks, CCleaner, Defragmentation, and system restore. My only restore point was earlier in the day but that didn't even work. I got an unknown error message before it could finish.

Any ideas? When I was installing the PSU I removed the SATA cable from the motherboard to give myself some work room, perhaps I didn't reconnect all of the cables up correctly? Or is my HDD just failing? Seems odd that these problems only appeared today after I was tampering with things.

 

[ss202sl]

I'd go through and reseat all the connections. run HDTUNE to see if there are any drive issues. How full is the drive?

 

[TheNewPCGuy]

I'll be sure to do that as soon as I can get back home. Don't have access to it currently but I thought I'd ask here to see how others felt in the meantime.
The HDD has about 200 gigs free.

 

[TheNewPCGuy]

Update: I used HDTUNE and it gave me no errors whatsoever after taking 109 minutes to complete. I also tried using Windows own error checker by going to the properties of the C: drive and scanning from there. Still no issues apparently.

Opened up my PC, swapped around different PSU cables and SATA cables in various different orders and configurations just to make sure nothing was faulty, but that doesn't seem to have helped. Computer still takes ages to boot and even when idle at the desktop my disk usage is at 100%.

One thing I did notice, though I'm not sure how important this is, is that the slot where you connect the SATA power cable (the L shape port) appears to be chipped. The top of the L shape, where it points down, has been broken off. So instead of it being an L shape, it's more of a straight line. I'm not sure if this makes a difference though considering the cable still fits in nice and snug. At this point I'm guessing I'm just going to have to buy a new HDD.