Is my Hard drive failing?

For the past couple months I've noticed my hard drives, both, have become fairly noisy. Programs, games especially, don't seem to run as ****, and choppier. And the most annoying is my windows boot time is up near 3-4 minutes. Never was like this. These hard drives are about 2-3 years old maybe.
One is a Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GB 10,000 RPM SATA-150 Hard Drive
Other one is a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6B300S0 300GB 7200 RPM SATA-150 Hard Drive.

The 74GB Raptor is the one Windows is installed on.

Here are some graphs of both hard drives under DiskSpeed32:







BelArc Specs:
Operating System System Model
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (build 2600) Enclosure Type: Desktop
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
2.00 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
256 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: C51MCP51
Bus Clock: 201 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG 01/19/2007
Drives Memory Modules c,d
374.42 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
285.15 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

TDK DVDRW880N [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

Maxtor 6B300S0 [Hard drive] (300.08 GB) -- drive 1
WDC WD740GD-00FLA2 [Hard drive] (74.36 GB) -- drive 0, s/n WD-WMAKE1768890, rev 31.08F31, SMART Status: Healthy 2048 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'A0' is Empty
Slot 'A1' has 1024 MB
Slot 'A2' is Empty
Slot 'A3' has 1024 MB
Local Drive Volumes


c: (NTFS on drive 0) 74.34 GB 38.44 GB free
d: (NTFS on drive 1) 300.08 GB 246.71 GB free

 

3-4 min boot times? wow. First, I'd use a program like CCleaner to look at the startup entries. I'd also use ccleaner to remove old unused registry entries as long as I was at it.

Are you hearing the "chirp" of death? or a more grinding like sound?

 

Just in case, you may want to back up the real important stuff to either a 3rd drive, or to some CDs/DVDs. Then visit the links below to download and run the diagnostic tools:
WesternDigital http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=1&swid=3 This can be run from within Windows; bootable tests are available also.
Maxtor http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/ Maxtor is now owned by Seagate.
You may want to check the warranty status on these drives, as most new hard drives have standard 3 year warranties from the factory.
Good luck!