I was just staring at my receipt for shipping back my latest casualty back to the manufacturer under RMA replacement. It says "FedEx Ground Commercial" - on a UPS form. How it actually went out, I don't know. I don't care either. But it has reminded me about how often I have been made to send drives back to this place. I have some kind of eerie tendancy to kill harddisks. This latest one was my 160G /store drive, which held EVERYTHING of importance to me. Thankfully, I had the foresight to purchase a 120G drive about a month before its failure to back up the data to.
Since that machine is acting as failover to my server, there is no backup! So, the night before the head crashed, I had decided to refresh the backup. Thank goodness! The really scary part is that this WAS THE BACKUP I had created since the last failure beforehand. At least that one was not complete and immediate - when I started seeing drive failures, I had copied my data over, and some files were in fact lost.
Now, I keep both drives online at all times, in different machines. There is a nightly rsync keeping it up to date, at least up to 24 hours, so the next time I lose a drive, I will have most of the data in another location. I really hope that I will no longer have to deal with these drive failures, and what I have now will just continue to work. But after sending back, oh, at least 8 drives, forgive me if I err on the side of caution.