Can a hard drive be faulty without reporting any issues?

Hi all, advice really most appreciated Hope this isn't too waffley for you all...
I have a 24" intel iMac (Core 2 Dual, white version, stock 320Gb HDD). It is out of warranty.
Over the last few weeks it has been getting VERY slow before finally becoming unusable. This appears to be when any hard drive access is required. Finder windows were taking literally minutes to appear (with spinning beach ball).
I did all the usual stuff such as repairing permissions, verified drive and ran a full Onyx cleanup. This all made no difference. I ran a Leopard archive-and-install. This took 10 hours! I remember the original Leopard install taking 30 minutes so somethings not right here. No improvement. I formatted the drive using 'write zeros' - which estimated 3 days to complete, but I stopped it after 12hrs.
I did a time machine restore to an external firewire drive, which I have now been running from for over a week, without a single issue. All is back to normal speed. (I'm surprised at just how fast it runs from an external firewire 800 drive, as I expected to notice a difference - I don't)
So, I now have a blank internal drive to test:
I ran disk utility repair disk. All OK.
I ran Disk Warrior. All OK.
I ran Techtool Pro 4 full hardware tests including disk surface scan. All reported OK including hard drive controller.
I ran Drive Genius surface scan - zero bad blocks.
So, do I have a failing hard drive or not????
I have read about similar symptoms here for a failing iMac drive but usually one of the hardware tests reports bad sectors. I have no such results, or any other symptoms.
Advice most welcome.

Hi tvrs3
{quote:}So, do I have a failing hard drive or not????{quote}
Try the Apple Hardware Test on your Install Disk, it might find a funky Serial ATA connection or problem with the Serial ATA bus?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509
Sense all the other test say the HD is OK, you might try restoring the Internal HD from your working External HD?
1. While booted from and running your External HD open Disk Utility.
2. Select the Internal HD's icon on the sidebar, then click the Restore tab
3. Now drag the External HD's icon into the Source box, the Internal HD's icon into the Destination box and click Restore.
{quote:}(I'm surprised at just how fast it runs from an external firewire 800 drive, as I expected to notice a difference - I don't){quote}
I can also boot and run normally from a clone on my FireWire 400 External HD without noticing much of a difference.
Dennis

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