Quote Originally Posted by 'Starbuck_Jones',index.php?page=Thread&postID=1820 82#post182082
Im going to disagree with your last statement there Deathwalker. If a head on a HDD "crashes" it will leave scratches on the platter. No amount of formatting is going to make that drive good again and the cast off from that scratch is going to just make things worse if the drive is even functional at that point.
The Raptor and some Seagate 200GB I have around both make this horrible scraping noise when you power them up...then there's a 750GB that scrambles data you put on it in short order, and a 1GB that does nothing at all.

Drives die. If you're lucky, not for a long time. I have lots, some fairly old, so I get a dead one a few times a year. Sometimes a few weeks apart, sometimes many months apart.