high load

[ephigenie]

It doesn't mean your hdd is broken.

Quote:Cpu(s): 0.7%us, 0.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 4.8%id, 93.6%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st

the 93,6% WA just means that your processor is waiting 93,6% of its time for its harddrive to handle over requested data.
It could be that there's some IO intensive third party process going on, using less CPU cycles but produces a lot of IO requests. At some point its just too much for your harddrive - and it cannot handle that load - thats why the whole server load gets high.

Because nearly everything will slow down then ...