The cure is worse than the disease

A few days ago I was discussing my recent hard drive related issues with El Gee and he suggested I check out HDD Health to monitor and diagnose my drives. This program monitors the S.M.A.R.T sensors, among other things, and over time builds an overall picture of the drive's health - good, bad, etc. Hoping it would give me a better idea of what's going on, I installed it.

The program comes configured to pop up alerts anytime certain thresholds are hit. Especially temperature, but also some error counts. I have no idea what these error counts mean. But the temperature is the one that's been bugging me the most. By default (and it appears that it doesn't save changes to this), it alerts when the drive crosses 45°C. My one drive with a temperature sensor seems to start at 42°. So, within a few minutes of usage, it's popping up messages. And it pops up a new one repeatedly even if you haven't acknowledged the previous one(s), so after a while of ignoring them I'll have a few dozen stacked up that need to be cleared.

Still no clear picture of what's causing my freeze-ups, aside from maybe heat. I'm going to attempt to disable these pop-ups while continuing to run the program, but if it won't store that as my default, it's getting uninstalled I think.