I doubt there will be much of a joust on this topic but I still want to vent on the subject. Is it just me or are the amount of drive failures skyrocketing lately? I within days of my fellow jousters Apple Macbook Pro hard drive (number 5 or so) failing my Media center PC lost its drive, its the second one in that machine in the last few years; I haven't replaced it yet, but a few days after that my sister called me and gave me the description of what her machine wasn't doing and I told her to bring it by, turns out a bad drive. I think the newer generation of drives are just crap, I have a machine I built in like 2001 and runs 24/7 without problems, the drive in my media center is a little over a year, same age as the original drive in it died, Dan's (my fellow jouster) Macbook Pro drives giving up is strange, I have a 17" powerbook that has really never been shut off in years, its used everyday and yet the drive is fine but then again its an older drive.
I'm thinking somehow that companies like Dell, Apple, Google and the likes have driven this to be so, Dell and Apple so you buy new machines and companies like Google to get you hooked on using applications online and store data online; Apple has a two fold in this, they like to sell hardware and like your $100 a year for a dot mac account, and I can't leave Microsoft out of it, they recently came up with a "Home Server" that will be your automatic backup for all your PC's in the house along with a central place for your data.
All I can say is that with the newer larger drives comes wayyyyyyyy toooooooo much failure.
Dave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk