Here's is a detailed look at what is happening with the new Hard drives.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691

Is there anyway to tell if a HDD is about to die?

make sure you have smart enabled on all your drives billy

billy try freezing the drives in a bag with a small smear of peanut butter to ionize

If I lose my COD4 saved games, I'm not going to care much. If I lose my sister's wedding photos, there would be a real problem. That's the kind of stuff in my MirroredFiles folder.

I would rather just use an incremental 100% content backup, so that neither important nor useful but unimportant files are lost. Losing a small amount of work is annoying enough.

I have a Time Machine backup, but I'm considering getting a second hard disk and doing back ups on that too, or possibly looking at cloud backups, though bandwidth and upload speed are the main reason why that's a hassle.

that Link from Lynx has diagrams explaining it.

thermite ya need to change your avatar to Ford Falcon

that pic makes me think you can't fly your plane off the threadmill

I don't get it.

Perhaps he meant Ford Fairlane (aka Andrew Dice Clay)? I dunno.