i have not had a bad hard disk for a long time now. but i have had crashes in the past. i do not really trust hard disks. they are going to be harder to trust in the future as both
seagate and western digital are reducing the warranties on their disks comprehensively.
so instead of 3/5 years, you are now looking at warranties of just one year. i try to have all important stuff i have in the cloud. and this is something i recommend to everyone. use a service like backblaze if your data is very important to you. if not, use free alternatives like
Dropbox,
Google Docs, Skydrive.
----------
i guess this is also because i tend to replace hard disks faster these days.
i have not bought a new hard disk in i believe 2 years now.
i plan to buy a hybrid unit to replace a 500GB drive i have which is the older of the two drives i have currently.
but then i would probably replace the secondary 1TB drive with a 2/3TB for storage too. all this when hard disk prices get sane again later this year.
i have no idea what i would do with these two disks then.
i do not like the idea of having four disks in my desktop. even though it can probably accommodate 6. probably more