[markhellewell]

I installed a new 250GB drive in my MacBook as soon as I bought it in late 2007. All was well for over a year until first thing Saturday morning when I got the pretty damning "disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED)" error which meant the thing was irrecoverably knackered. Thankfully I've been running Time Machine over airport at home for the last few months so was able to swap out the 250GB for the original 120GB, boot from my installation DVD and recover the system as of late Friday night simply by choosing the "Restore System from Backup". All worked flawlessly, good work, Apple!

It was a Samsung drive that failed, and it apparently had a 3 year warranty so is back at Streetwise right now getting a look see.

[tintinaujapon]

Glad TimeMachine worked so well for you.

I've had 3 Hitachi drives fail on me in the last few years.

I learned my lesson and SuperDuper has been my bootable backup saviour twice now.

[dopus]

Superduper rules the roost (I don't have a time capsule - yet - **Do you hear me Santa**) :-)

I have also found that Hitachi drives (the old IBM ones) seem to pass on more frequently than others. I must say, I prefer the Samsung drives now.

[iSilver]

Those old Hitachi/IBM drives have a nickname - and it's well earned it, they are known as "DeathStar" instead of their correct moniker "DeskStar"!