It seems you have been lucky. My 80286's 20MB HD failed back in 1993, so did my 1998 IBM 3.5" 20GB Hard Disk. Maxtor 80GB in 2003. Samsung 80GB in 2004. Seagat

It seems you have been lucky. My 80286's 20MB HD failed back in 1993, so did my 1998 IBM 3.5" 20GB Hard Disk. Maxtor 80GB in 2003. Samsung 80GB in 2004. Seagate 160GB in 2006. Western Digital 500GB in 2010. All of these are part of my 20 or so Desktop Disks I've had had until now (pre and custom built PCs running under either some flavor of Windows, Linux or BSD) That is only for desktop hard disks, I don't even talk about 2.5" notebook hard disks which I've lost 2 both of which were less than 3 years old Seagate Momentus 80GB and 320GB (G-Shock!). I'm a happy Intel X-25M SSD fan boy now, I hope it will last longer than those consumer grade mechanical hard disks of yesteryears (at least until they wear out the flash memory or until my 07 MBP dies). After I had to replace good old SCSI disks with cheap SATA disks over the last years at my different work places I've seen how great those SCSI disks were in the first place - still it is cheaper the SATA way (as long as you have at least hot-swappable RAID 6 storage or some super expensive NAS where rebuilding isn't potentially endangering your uptime). So what I want to say is this: either you've been Gladstone Gander or I've been Donald Duck or we've been both which should be reflected in the median failover rate for mechanical (consumer grade) hard disks. Don't get nervous about your MBP, just swap the disk for a SSD and set up time machine or a rsync script. I wish I had made the decision to go for SSD much earlier as "I've wasted my hours."