well i've got a 4 year old 40gb drive that seems to be having issues, not sure WHY just yet, that i'm trying to use to replace a 6 year old
20gb drive that was part of a raid1 mirror to protect against drive failure, because the OTHER drive is a 13gb drive that is about 15 years
old..... and still going strong, not a single bad block (thats detectable to me anyway),
great spin up speed, no head issues, nothing as far as i can tell
suggests jumping on ebay and getting a new one
... since the 4 year old one is going to do the same thing as the 6 year old one is doing now... in 2 year stime