Repeated hard drive failures

My 17" PowerBook is less than two years old. In February of this year, the HD failed without any warning, just wouldn't boot anymore. Did all the usual testing, etc. Called Apple, and they had me send it back for a new hard drive.
Fast forward four months, repeat scenario. I should be getting the box to send it back next week some time.
In both cases, I had no warning (slowdowns, spinning beachballs, etc.); it just would never get past the grey screen with the Apple.
I'm wondering if this is an anomaly or are other users experiencing similar events. I'm at the point where I'm afraid to use it for anything important without backing up every night. (I generally back up weekly.)
G4 17" Powerbook, 80 GB HD, 1 GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

What's really strange about this is that I did have
SMART reporter installed and there was no warning in
both cases.
That's really not that odd. The thing about S.M.A.R.T. is that it's good at predicting gradual failure, but not sudden, catastrophic failure. For that reason, if a drive's S.M.A.R.T. status is "failing", then it's important to prepare for that failure, but just because it says "verified" doesn't mean there's not some lurking problem that hasn't been detected yet.
Unfortunately, neither SMARTReporter nor Disk Utility give very much detail about the individual parameters that they're monitoring. There's another program called smartmontools that gives much more detailed reports. However, it has to be compiled from source code and is a command-line program. So it's not very simple to install and use...
If you're interested in the technology, this site has a lot of good information on S.M.A.R.T.
This is what makes me wonder if there is not
something that causes the hard drive to fail without
warning.
Well, it could just be that you've have unusually bad luck. Or there could be another component in your computer affecting the hard drive, like the power supply. But if that other component won't fail or show itself as somehow at fault during a hardware test, it's going to be very tough to figure out exactly what's causing your problems.
One thing with hard drives is to be very careful about any kind of sudden movements when the computer is on. I always close the lid and put my computer to sleep when I move to another room. We've had a lot of problems where I work with people moving FireWire drives while they're on and damaging them.
charlie

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    iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

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    Regards,
    DP-K
    ****Click the White thumb to say thanks****
    ****Please mark Accept As Solution if it solves your problem****
    ****I don't work for HP****
    Microsoft MVP - Windows Experience

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