Dying hard drive, getting a new one, will it work?

[Snacks289]

I've been having a problem for a while. In games, there will be brief stutters, noticeably dropping to about 20 fps for half a second. I changed the nvidia settings around, from balanced to performance to custom, nothing helps. It affects every game, and one game in particular (Dustforce) has inexplicably broken graphics, so that seems like something somewhere is corrupted. Only a month ago I formatted the computer and did a chkdsk (but no memtest), but the current drive is 4 years old, who knows what could be happening? I've heard it might be dying, and when I turned the computer off overnight, I turned it on today and the hard drive was making scratching sounds like it was trying to write a lot of data, when all it was doing was loading the desktop. I think I should try a new one, but I don't really know anything about hard drives. I just went around and picked the highest-rated one I could find with at least 500GB of memory and a decent cache size, and came up with this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136697

My current cobbled-together computer is
Intel E8400 (3.0 ghz)
Asus P5G41T M LX
Corsair XMS 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 PC3 12800
EVGA Geforce GTX 560 Ti 1GB
Corsair TX650W PSU
Windows XP Home 32-bit

 

[smorizio]

most hard drive vendors make drive tools to check the drive health..seatools is seagates tool. wd has one too. i would also get a free program and read the drive smart info. it tell your drive is ok or healthy. for the video card try usign a drive sweaper and use one of the older 29x drivers. the newer 301 and the 500 have had some bugs. if dust wont play i would email there suport and see if they use flash or opend gl or directx...that would at lest help you see if it somthing on your pc is damaged on needs to be installed.