'''Problems are wrong drives'''.
''The WD1600BEKT is a SATA II drive and '''you have a SATA I box '''you're trying to use it on''. If it clames to automagically detect and adjust throughput speed it's not doing it (''most SATA revs are backward compatible one version -looks like you've found a couple of exceptions'') if possible, and you know or find out how, you'd have to '''manually jumper them down to SATA I'''. ''I don't know what jumpers to use so I have no idea if you're in the ball park''.
The same thing seems to be going on with the WD1600BEVT. It too appears to be a SATA II drive.
Any OS uses VMEM and SWAP files - if there's problems accessing the drive then freezing and errors would be a normal result.
''If this answer is acceptable '''please remember to return and mark it accepted'''.''