Intermittent SATA Hard Drive problem

[Hodsocks]

I am having some problems with a pc I built before christmas and it seems to be with the hard drive. It was originally working OK and then it started to freeze and when you rebooted it could not find the hard drive. I brought it home to check it out, checked all the cables and turned it on and it worked fine for me, no freezing or not finding drive. I had it for 3 days, on most of the time, rebooted it often, carried out diagnostics on the drive and it seemed to be fine so I returned it.
Two weeks later the same thing happens again, so again I bring it home, connect it up and it works fine for me, at the moment I have had it for 3 days and it has worked flawlessly.
The spec is: Maxtor 80GB SATA; sempron 2800; ASUS K8V-MX motherboard; 512Mb PC3200 crucial memory; Windows XP SP2.
Has anyone any suggestions as to what is going on here?

 

[Nodsu]

Check the cables? Bad PSU? Overheating? And of course, malfunctioning SATA controller (overclocking?).

 

[Hodsocks]

All cables were checked and reseated, no overclocking. problem usually occurs within 10 mins of it being turned on. I would have thought if the problem was for any of the causes as suggested it would happen at my home yet it runs without problem here, I'm mystified.