Disk Load intermittenly blinks red...how worried should I be?!?

I haven't done a lot of field testing to see if my "red disk issue" is just within this one project or not...trying to figure out why a relatively small project (30 or so tracks with normal EFX, etc.) would be pulling disk load of 70% or greater from my internal HD.  I've tried to eliminate all of my 32-bit plugins...I think a few may have been used on this particular project (had crash issues before with BitBridge...).
 
For comparison, I did a quick backup onto an external drive, opened and worked on the same project, and the load was in the mid-teens to 20%...also seemed to play much quicker, etc.
 
Add in another detail -- I found the blue screen of "crash dump" the other morning (I usually set my computer to sleep after backing things up), tried to run CHKDSK and it got "stuck" on stage 5 - verifying free space.  I had to hard restart it.
 
A couple of questions:
1) Does this sound like a hard drive on the edge of dying?  I find it hard to believe on a less-than-1-year-old Dell XPS (specs below). 
2) Does it makes sense to work on future Sonar projects on an external hard drive exclusively?  My normal protocol is to work within my desktop, then backup and transfer to external once the project is complete.
 
Any help from more "techy" people would be appreciated!  Thanks so much.
 
Sonar X3
Intel Core i7-2600 Quad Core (3.4 GHz, 8MB Cache)
1GB Radeon HD 6450 Graphics
16GB DDR3 1333 RAM
1TB 7,200RPM Hard Drive (2 x 500GB RAID 0)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit

No...I think it actually got "stuck"...there was no activity on the HDD light, I couldn't hear any internal noise, and the screen didn't even have any exact numbers, just said "    of   stages completed" or something like that.  Right now I'm backing everything up with whatever "Windows Backup" comes standard on the Dell...is Acronis better for audio computers or something?  Thanks Alex.

Yes John...just the one internal HD (where all of my audio, samples, etc.) reside...also have two Seagate external drives.  Better to get another internal drive rather than utilize externals?
 

caminitic
Yes John...just the one internal HD (where all of my audio, samples, etc.) reside...also have two Seagate external drives.  Better to get another internal drive rather than utilize externals?
 

I think its what works best for you. If the externals are SATA I see no reason not to use them. If they are USB it becomes a bit more complicated. At any rate having all your oranges in one box is not a good way to work with audio if you can avoid that. 

Thanks guys...my Seagate drives are actually SSD USB drives...not good???  =-/

If chkdsk is stalling it's not a good sign and Sonar isn't going to be related to this, it could be chipset drivers in retrospect (I assume the USB drivers didn't come with their own drivers, if they did check for updates):
... and please run this:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Driver-Boost-m2928792.aspx
 
If it updates your chipset drivers etc please run chkdsk again after you've rebooted a couple of times....
Also your hard drives may have firmware upgrades available on seagates website, get the make and model numbers out.

I not sure but I thought one is not to use Chkdsk on SSD drives.  

John
I not sure but I thought one is not to use Chkdsk on SSD drives.  

Yup I think you have a point....!!
 
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/284051-32-chkdsk-usage-intel
 
So you've done driverboost...
Check seagates site for firmware updates I suggest then.