Hard Drives Constantly Failing

Question

I just received a new hard drive Monday through an AASP in Puebla, Mexico, due to a hard drive failure within two months of purchasing my laptop. Sadly, I'm now reinstalling OSX due to what appears to be a very similiar hard drive failure. Luckily, my computer is still under warranty.
I'm not a computer whiz so here are some details of the first hard drive's failure (the current hard drive is failing in much the same manner).
1) The computer became increasingly slow, eventually freezing, forcing me to force restart.
2) Should I be lucky enough that the Macbook would reboot, it would be even slower than before, and freezing sooner than before. This would forece me to reboot, leading to step 1 or 3.
3) The hard drive would no longer boot, forcing me to try suck fixes as...
-repairing from the disk utility, which did not work
-trying fsck which also did not work
4) Reinstalling OSX, going back to step 2, and repeating until the hard drive was no longer recognized.
It appears that either
A) I'm doing something horribly wrong which is destroying my hard drives.
B) There is some other hardware problem that is slowly killing my hard drives, or..
C) My AASP didn't actually replace my hard drive.
What do I do, and would it be possible to get a new Macbook under my warranty?
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Apple doesn't publish a policy on replacements, but anecdotally, it seems that if Apple has tried three or four times or more to repair the same problem and not met with success, they'll consider replacing the machine.
Sure, but it's a little different if an AASP's been doing the repairs. Also because it's been the exact same repair over and over, I doubt they'd be willing to replace the entire unit without trying something else first.
Hard drives fail — they just do. One may run like a top for ten years, while the one that came off the assembly line right behind it could fail on Day 2. Odds are that you've simply been unlucky.
Also, yeah, HDDs fail, but it doesn't make sense to have 3 HDDs fail in quick succession.
Seems like, which came first...the chicken or the egg...except it's which came first, the freezing or the directory corruption.
You could very well have a failed/failing hard drive flex cable (connects the drive to the logic board) or a failed/failing controller on the logic board. I'd bet flex cable myself, but it's hard to say without working with the machine firsthand. The bad cable causes the computer to freeze, which causes you to force it to shut off, which means files don't get put away properly. This leads to data corruption, partition map corruption, volume header corruption, all kinds of stuff that makes it impossible to boot. It snowballs from there each time you try to use it.
I'd agree it's possible to coincidentally have more than one failed drive in a row, absolutely. But for them to all have the exact same problem and the exact same progression to me indicates a bigger problem.
Message was edited by: k.panic