[dottrap]

It sucks when hard drives fail, but it isn't that "uncommon" for drives to fail in under two years. A lot of disk manufactures only offer a 1 year warranty for a lot of their models nowadays.

Google did a study on failure rates: http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-exper...

The trick is to buy stuff with a credit card that offers warranty extensions (usually 1 year). Just call up the credit card company and they will tell you what you need to do.