OpenSUSE Hardware :: Possible Hard Disk Failure Imminent?

[System: OpenSuSE 11.0 , kernel 2.6.25.20-0.7-pae, athlon i386] I've recently begun to have problems with my Sata Hitachi disk drive; it stores all my documents and music etc. I've only begun to notice these problems when I installed the Ex2 IFS driver for Windows so I could access my data (read only) from my Windows disk. However, the problem is not exclusive to Windows; Windows blue-screens when the Sata link goes down, but SuSE attempts to re-establish a link. Here's the dmesg output (only includes output relevant to disk activity). I've also run smartcl on the disk, here's the output. Note that the output says that it's soft-resetting the link. Any clues as to what this may infer? Also, the system has sometimes failed to boot as it sees the disk as corrupted and asks me to perform a fsck, which rewrites the journal (although this may or may not have been down to the aforementioned driver possibly not playing nice with the journal, even though it is in read only mode) and restores the disk to working order.

I can have periods of days where the disk works perfectly fine on both Windows and SusE, and random events where the disk link goes down for some reason. The situation seems to be remedied by me physically pushing the Sata cable into the disk and motherboard., and returns when the computer tower is subject to a considerable vibration from a slight knock et cetera. On the other hand, this may be a power problem, some ends on a rail are faulty on my PSU and will only give power to my optical drives if they are positioned in a certain angle, although this is probably less likely as the disks don't go offline, just the link.