MBP - Death of a Hard Disk

I recently posted that my MBP was dead but that was not true. It didn't start up anymore and initially, I couldn't get it to boot from the CD either. But it turns out that it just took a really long time to even recognize the CD. Reason was that the hard disk was so destroyed that any computer booting up with this HD installed "pauses" for about 3 or 4 minutes before anything happens.

The hard disk, a Hitachi 7K200 I had installed myself, passed away rather suddenly - one moment everything was good, next moment the HD was destroyed.

I ran some recovery programs both PC based and Mac based and none could restore anything. Now I am using SpinRite software on the PC which involves starting up from USB stick and inserting the HD into the SATA slot (this is a laptop). It's reporting some physical damage on the platters and if going at the current speed will take 10 years to complete - so it's not looking good for that drive.

The local Apple shop replaced the HD with my original 120GB free of charge which was nice.

I thought that because I had installed the HD myself, maybe there was a cable loose or damaged but that turned out to be not the case. It's just the HD that's a goner

Do backups, folks. I was slacking so my backup was 3 weeks old and I lost some stuff, but on the positive side, at least I had a backup!

 

I thought installing your own HDD voids the warranty. In any case why would apple replace a HDD that you bought and installed yourself, when presumably the one they gave you still works? going by what you said above, APPLE just gave you a free 120GB HDD.......

Unless you meant apple 're-installed' your 120GB apple HDD for you? But why wouldnt you just reinstall the 120GB yourself.

again, i thought installing HDD yourself voids the warranty. which is fairenough, since the whole operation involved some risky procedures.

 

Makes me sad to read posts about 200GB 7200rpm drives dying. I just installed a 7K200 in my MBP yesterday.

 

I don't do harddrive backups since I've never had a hard driver failure.

Most of my important documents/files are in my gmail account

I usually sell my computer when its 2-3 years old and buy a new one. I think it is less likely to have any hardware failure this way

 

So you actually installed the 200GB HDD yourself? I'm just curious about the level of difficulty since the MBP doesn't seem particularly upgrade friendly other than the RAM. My 160GB 5400rpm HDD is sufficient for now and was the best option when I bought it, but I'm already finding myself space constrained because of Boot Camp and obese games.

 

I've yet to run into that problem, though I assume I will once I finish importing my CD and DVD library into iTunes in an iPod friendly format. Thankfully I have a 2TB external hard disk, so as long as I'm at my station, I'll always have my media on hand.

I probably won't upgrade the MBP's hard disk until there's a 500GB 5400RPM option available. Since it's going to be a difficult upgrade, I might as well wait until there's a semi-large hard disk to replace my existing one with. Right now, the largest is 320GB at 5400RPM. So we're getting closer to that mark. :X

It seems kind of sad though, that my iPod has the same size hard drive that my laptop does. :X