My Seagate 1TB wouldn't be recognized by the BIOS anymore and my computer would take 5 minutes before it started booting to Windows.
I thought it was the firmware problem that affected these, but this evening a Seagate rep called me, and told me that it was one of the drive's reading heads that went bad.
They are giving me the choice between sending me a brand new drive, sending me back the dud drive, or going with their data recovery process. Actual data recovery would cost a lot money, that I don't have in the first place.
Fortunately though, I ultimately found that there is little data that was truly important to me, that just went away. The only ones that truly hurt, are my 50+ hours saves for Morrowind and Divine Divinity. But even then, when you replay a game, it takes far less time to do all the same tasks, since you're not confused anymore about what to do. Considering this, I'll just go with the shiny new drive.
Lesson learned for next time: when you play long games, back up your saves onto media with no movable parts.
Have any of you guys ever lost some of your precious game saves in a similar fashion?

yeah, dunno what happened but my macbook hdd died on me, probably because the battery was dead and my kids kept unplugging it.
anyway, I lost my street fighter 4 saves, and I was really proud of all the unlocked characters and tags and etc.
it's ok, it's a fun game and deserves another play through.
Otherwise, I can't think of any other games I had on there where I was concerned about a save.

Beginning of this year, I bought a Maxtor 500GB SATA2 drive for storing my TV shows and movies I download. A few months later, it died, totally. None of my software would read it. I packaged it up, and sent it off to Seagate/Maxtor's offices in this country and within 7 days I had a brand-new one.
That month, I nearly reached 100GB of data re-downloading most of what I had lost.
Yay for unlimited downloads from my ISP :D Although I don't get why they warned me at 80GB of data that they'd limit my speeds during peak periods if I broke 100GB in the month : They already employ traffic shaping from ~1600hrs - ~0030hrs each day :dry:

I have a 1TB drive (well, it's actually two 500GBs in RAID 0) and I've never had problems. They say that drive reliability is flaky because there's not way to ensure data redundancy, but like I've said, I'm happy with my Western Digitals. I do back up by game saves to both a Maxtor external drive along with my entire My Documents folder, music and porn, as well as backing it up to Mozy.
Speaking of which, Steam should get on with that Steam Cloud thing. Only two games (or more) support it, which is a damn shame.

Question: do you bump your PC often? Have you dropped the hard disk before? Any strange clicking noises in the hard disk?
Just asking out of curiosity. They always make me paranoid.

I bought myself a 250gb external HDD to hopefully avoid such problems, and I back up certain things (music, video, savegames, etc.) on a fairly regular basis.
Mind you, I can see myself getting lazy with the savegame backup.

When my HD heads crashed I'd had no signs. No unusual crashes. No bumps. no strange noises. Then it was just "clunk" and nothing.
Me too. After 15+ years of using a PC my last laptop dying a few months back caused me enough stress to buy an external backup. I realised that , unlike 10 years ago, I have a lot of irreplaceable/important data - photos, videos, documents, etc..
If you're on vista you should set up an automatic backup, otherwise you'll forget. Actually, same goes for whatever OS you're on, there are loads of good free auto backup softwares now.
When my laptop dies it had my 2+ years of on-and-off morrowind on it. I actually rescued the hard drive and stuck it in a USB case, so I can get them if i want... but in the end i decided to give up on morrowind for now and play something less time consuming.

Trouble is when you have a crapload* of data that you want to store securely... I'm looking into getting a Drobo as they seem awfully good, but as they cost over $600 US (here in Sweden, "cheaper" in America) not counting the drives to put in it, it's not exactly cheap.
*crapload defined as: "the common 1-2 TB external/NAS raid drives won't hold for long".

I typically replace my drives (normally run 2) after so much time has passed, so I do not have this issue very often. I have only had one drive ever die on me and that was way back in the day when a 40 Meg drive was huge.
This means I have still have functioning drives stored away likely to never be used again (I think one is a 3 gig drive :o) ), but it also allows me to move my files before anything (other than a failure) happens to them.

I had this happen once, on my old P2 400MHz (that was only 6 years ago) and I lost my Oni savegames (and I finally reached the last level. I was so frustrated that I returned the game back to my friend (it was only borrowed) .

Man, this looks sweet. I think next go I may consider this and a couple drives. Very nice.

What are you storing? Just wondering...
EDIT: I totally want a Drobo too.

Movies, music, games, software, stuff too old and/or obscure to be (easily) found again but that I wish to keep for various reasons. Purchased, and ... uh... not purchased. Also stuff I've made, but that doesn't add up to much, relatively, even if a photoshop document easily can become a GB or more and I always store originals of my various creations.

I have had Maxtor drives fail too. Now I'm mostly Western Digital and Seagate (yeah I know)...
I am sync/backup crazy though. I just signed up for CrashPlan Central. Unlimited online backups (almost 80GB at this moment) for about $60/year. You can configure it to never delete, set up a local "storage" folder, and then just delete the file locally when you need room. Get it back from online when you need it.
I also have 3-way syncs going on in my local network. Yeah I'm plumb loco, but I'm never gonna lose stuff again!

I've accidently deleted the wrong partition and lost about 200GB of data before. That was the cause of much swearing