Hi James
After another 2 weeks of faultless playing, I have to conclude the problems I had were not related to the attached HDD , but to the thumbdrives attached to the front. I left the front Thumbdrives out and everything went perfectly fine. (I even believe(d) the BDP1 sounded better without usb's loaded on the front, but that might be psychology....)

I've changed thumbdrives rangeing from 500mb to 8 gb, and I find that whenever thumbdrives are attached, playing from the HDD is compromised.
Could it have to do with USB slowing down because of the slower speed of the thumbdrives as opposed to the speed of the HDD. USB slows down to the slowest performer in the chain, and when those thumbdrives are indeed the bottleneck, HDD playing (and combined with writing to it) might be sub-optimal?
Thanks,
Marius
Hi marius - it seems like you have had continuing issues with that particular 1TB drive?
james