OK, here is HD Tune run from UBCDWin (which runs XPP). The results still seem somewhat erratic (though better) for a new drive, but maybe I am missing something. I'm not really a hardware guy...
And 2.55 is the most recent FREE version of HD Tune.
This is from a 2 week old Seagate ST31000528AS. I did update the firmware to CC46 from CC38 but it made little difference. This IS the system drive so I'm sure that contributes to the irregularity, but testing on a quiet system I would expect better grouping of the data. Am I wrong and this...