Mac Pro internal drive problems

Hi there,
I bought a Mac Pro in October last year for business use and it's been going fine until about a month ago.
I have two internal drives and one of them was making a terrible THUNK! noise, powering down, then trying to start again - you can hear it spinning, not quiet getting there, then spinning again. When this happens, the machine hangs, sometimes until the drive gets back on it's feet, other times I need to do a hard restart. 50% of the time the machine will not start at all. ( gets to gray apple screen and goes nowhere)
It seems to be the boot drive that the machine shipped with that's causing the problems as Disk Utility keeps finding erros on it. When I repair it, the machine works fine for a while until, when I'm working away, suddenly THUNK! and everything starts over again! Also, my bluetooth mouse and keyboard seems to be palying up too, but I don't know if this is related.
I'm tearing my hair out and I need to edit some video on it for work soon, but this seems like it's going to be impossible if the drive keeps stopping like this!
Any advice would be much appreciated!
David Newbigging
Mac Pro 2.66 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Definitely get the backups current, an external FW would be nice to have too so you have it off line.
I zero every drive before using. It is possible that there are bad blocks. Which, according to a Google report, means it is likely to fail anyway. But zero the drive may be enough. Or 7way write erase.
Or use Windows and the vendor disk utility (which seem to be limited to DOS or Windows, even Vista has one) to recertify the drive.
I would buy a drive now, and try to get it replaced.
A severely corrupted directory can cause a drive to sound like it is in the death throes of failing.
Do you have Disk Warrior 4? have you installed Applejack? used Single User Mode and run fsck to repair the drive?
And have you already setup a 2nd boot drive? always essential to have an emergency boot drive; a working backup drive; and your main boot drive.
If a drive is going to fail, make it early on.
There are tools like Intech Speedtools to test and remap bad blocks. I always test and torture test a drive for a few days before trusting it.

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