[svandamme]

IDE controllers are terrible at isolating disk problems
if both disks are on the same controller, it's normal to have one disk, crap out the controller, and as such the second disk with it...
Once the controller craps out, it will bring down the entire OS with it, even if the OS isn't running of one of the disks on that controller... This was the main reason for using Scsi for servers back in the days.. Scisi controllers were "stupid" and the disks were "smart".. one disk goes out, and it would not affect the rest of the system, hell, you don't even need hot plug hardware to hot plug a scsi drive...

New pc, well, maybe, depends on how important it is to you
if you can do with the occasional downtime, don't have important data, or you have it backed up... you might try to isolate the problem...

Try running without the slave disk... , disconnect it completely, power off, then see if the noise and hangs still occur... if so , retest with just disk 2...

if both act up, try the secondary ide controller on the motherboard... that is , if your bios allows you to use that one to boot from