o ya, forgot to mention.... its kind of funny how the people who know best (us) reccommend backing up your data at least once a month; knowing the multitude of things that can possibly go wrong. I can truthfully say i have never made a backup of my whole HD, EVER! ... thats like an auto mechanic knowin you need to change your oil every 3,000 miles, or 3 months, but running his car on the oil that was put in at the factory a year ago.
.... yeah hard drives usually don't go belly up like that, and def. wouldnt smoke.... they can actually take quite a beating
.... one of the guys in my advanced networking class has a hard drive that (4 quarters ago) we took apart (even had the top head removed, and the top platter out, rolling it around on the floor. dude put it all back together and has been using the hard drive for all his labs since... when he runs scandisk before an install he comes up with ONE bad sector, thats it. Pretty crazy it still works seeing as hard drives have to be air tight due to the fact that a microscopic PEICE OF DUST getting under your read/write head can cause the whole disk to crash.
