I've had mixed results with Acronis True Image also. Even the free versions rebranded as "Seagate Disk Wizard" & "Acronis True Image WD Edition" During the time (prior to 2009) when I only had XP/Win 2000, it ran good.
But on some Windows 7 64 bit installs, it does good, and some, not so good. I cannot explain the reason, as 2 of the installs (the one it works well with & the one it doesn't) are on the same PC. But different HDD's. My main 2 are a 1TB WD Caviar Black & a Samsung HD103SJ, both excellent drives, both have a 32MB cache & runs at 7200rpm. I actually have 2 of the Samsung HD103SJ's, one is for backups. At the time, I got them both for $49.99 each, one from Newegg & one from Amazon. Amazon packages their HDD's better.
You may want to check to see if that 500GB WD HDD is still under warranty. There are also tools on their site that can help to determine the health of the drive, but if you're having bad sectors that soon, it's best to let them replace it. The HDD that you'll get in return will be a refurbished one. I can vouch for this, because the WD Caviar Black that I described above was originally a 750GB one, when they exchanged it (it was fast), I ended up with a 1TB one. It was months later that I was looking at the label, and needed a magnifying glass to see it, it said "Refurbished" in very small letters. But it still runs good & fast. The original was vibrating badly in my desktop.
As far as a good backup program goes, Todo Backup 4.0 is really good, it does file & image backups. Plus they have free partitioning software that's as good as any that I've used. Get it here:
Best free backup software. Hard drive backup and recovery, image and clone freeware - EaseUS Todo Backup Free
Macrium Reflect is good also, but with the free version, only images can be done.
Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download
Both of these programs are way faster than Windows Backup, and Macrium is faster than Acronis. I've not had any problems with restoring the backups, they ran just as well as they did before the images were taken. The only computer that I now have Acronis on is my ThinkPad that runs XP/Windows 2000.
Cat