VAIO Laptop model SVE1712Z1EB

Windows 8

The VAIO Laptop regularly has programs stalling and becoming unresponsive during which time Task Manager shows Disk Usage Active Time at 100PERCENTAGESIGN.

Event Viewer repeatedly has disk warnings saying "The IO operation at logical block address ####### for Disk 0 was retried" - with ###### varying.

Repeatedly Scandisk says the Hard Drive needs repairing on reboot (which takes about 8 hours each time when it does) but this doesn't fix the problem.

I have ran the Vaio Care HDD Diagnostics and again after a few hours it fails each time, I believe on the Funnel Test. Vaio Care now has the message "VAIO Hardware Diagnostics HDD: Needs Attention" but doesn't run much advice beyond running Scandisk (which doesn't fix it and it again fails the next diagnostic test).

Not sure if its related but guessing so; I'm getting quite a few Blue Screen Of Death crashes. When it crashes on screen the error message is KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR.