Potentially dying hard drive, would the warranty cover its replacement?

hi, i have an early 2011 15" MacBook Pro (8gb ram, 750gb Toshiba 5.4k hard drive) purchased in september.
lately its been dropping its main partitions regularly and screwing up disk permissions so in my paranoia i checked the S.M.A.R.T Status of the drive (System information declared it as Verified, and i sighed it off as one of the downsides of OS X) but not long after that i started getting major league beachballing.
verified my permissions and still it refused to go away, making even the most menial of tasks ie opening iTunes or a new tab in Chrome take an eternity.
so suspecting it was an issue with the drive i did a clean install on the drive (still got the beachballing on a new system... very suspicious) after that i then swapped it out with a 320gb i had from a previous laptop, suffices to say i was suprised by the vast increase in speed both in boot time and program access times though i did suspect it was more due to the fact i hadn't reinstalled my programs to it.
after this i thought i'd try and get a more thorough S.M.A.R.T. Report from my toshiba drive. after a bit of research i came across a little app called SMARTreporter. (have any of you guys used it?) and asked it to do a quick SMART test. this test failed due to an I/O error, convieniently around the time i got some beachballing. so i let it monitor my disk in the background.
basically every time i get beachballing i seem to get notified of an I/O error. lo and behold in the kernel log i get reports of i/o errors from my main drive. this makes me think that this drive is on its way out the door.
would my years warranty cover the replacement of it?

i would run the AHT test myself but my system came with Lion on it and my internet connection requires me to log in through a web page first before i can do anything rendering the internet test unuseable
i'll head to my nearest store on saturday and see what they can say about it.

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