I have had more than one bad experience - not only have I had many of my own drives go bad (I have a lot of PCs and hard drives in the house - as in, well into double digits), I've done tech support professionally for over 10 years, supporting hundreds of users, plus have done a lot of "home" consulting on the side - PC building, repairing, etc. (I've also been using computers of some sort since probably 1979 or so, starting with the Atari 400 - this was when a floppy drive was a luxury, forget hard drives!) For the past 5-6 years, it's been about 95% laptops, mainly Dells (past 6 years or so) and before that IBMs. I've seen every major brand of hard drive fail, I've seen every laptop drives fail, desktop drives, big SCSI server drives - you name it. Of course, some are better than others, and some are worse. Early Western Digital 1.6g drives were dropping like flies about nine years ago (they also screwed up and sent me about 8 extra warranty replacement drives! every day, another one or two would arrive), and IBM had some many reliability problems with some of their 30g and 40g 3.5" drives that they lost all the goodwill they'd built up with their good, smaller drives - it's possible that might have even led them towards selling their HD business to Hitachi. IBM also had pretty severe issues with the drives that have been in Dell laptops for quite a while, finally Dell starts replacing them with Fujitsus recently.
Unfortunately, the majority (but probably by a slim margin) of laptop hard drive failures I've seen have resulted in a completely unreadable drive. Fortunately, this is not always the case. Failures generally happen in two ways:
1. The hard drive begins getting bad sectors. As often as not, they are in unused or rarely used areas of the drive and go unnoticed, until one affects a file required for Windows startup. This is when the drive can have data be recovered - either by using something like BartPE (a very handy utility, basically a stripped-down WinXP on CD that can read the local drive and copy files across the network or even burn a CD), or by putting the drive into another system as a slave or with a USB cable (I keep a ByteCC cable around for this purpose.) Some drives that people assume are OK fall into this category and are in fact faulty, enough to quality for a warranty replacement, because the bad sectors are not noticed. Sometimes the bad sectors are "sort of" readable, and you'll see things like Windows taking a particular long time to boot.
2. The drive is completely unreadable, sometimes unrecognized by the PC. This is often accompanied by unhappy clicking noises - with laptop drives, you sometimes have to put your ear to the system to hear it properly.
I'm not trying to question your experience, but I've seen far too many people lose a lot of data due to hard drive failures. It is absolutely a serious problem and anyone ignoring it does so at their peril. I honestly hope no one here has to experience a hard drive failure. But odds are, you will - sooner or later.
Yes, let me clarify. Howabout "Relatively Inexpensive" as opposed to "Cheap". Also, we'll be staying onsite with no car. Can you have your personal pics on your own SD card burned to a CD at the parks? If so, where and how much?
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