hard drive failure....thoughts?

[kevinuaa]

After procrastinating on recording a crappy song I wrote, I opened up garageband yesterday. my computer crashed and my hard drive failed. My powerbook 12" g4 rev c is only 22 months old!

according to the disk utility, it is a S.M.A.R.T. failure. I was able to reinstall the OS and it's up and running again, but the hard drive failure is still there...

my question, dear readers, is:

1. how long can i continue to use the drive until it crashes again?
My guess is that it could crash at any point...

2. Is there any reason I should swap the drive before it crashes again? I would like to put off replacing it...i have an external and I can use that as much as possible. I'm thinking of just buying a new computer...but if that's the case I would like to wait a couple of months.

aloha& thanks for your thoughts

 

[Sun Baked]

If you have AppleCare, get Apple to replace the drive now.

The drive will obviously die soon, replace it.

Of course drives these days aren't reliable these days (one of the reasons they shortened the warranties when they did) unless you buy from the maker's enterprise class desktop drives.

But those generally aren't notebook drives, with a notebook -- back up often, and buy the best warrantied drive you can.

 

[elfin buddy]

My PowerBook's hard drive died just a couple of months ago, about the same age as yours. It was a slow death, so I managed to back everything up with few problems. I brought it to my university Apple Repair Centre while it was dying, but they refused to touch it until it was 100% dead. I tried using my external hard drive backup partition as the boot drive while the internal drive was dying, but the computer was nearly unusable because it would try to access the dying drive every few minutes and end up hanging.

If I were you, I'd get it replaced as soon as possible. Hope you're covered under AppleCare!

 

[quigleybc]

Run to the store and buy DVD-R's and start getting your Back up on.....