Yes HD's fail but these Hitachi (aka IBM) are terrible. As for Wigadore saying "Hitachi TravelStar drives are one of the best yet", I totaly disagree.  They are the cheapest hard drives.  Go price match them, you will see.  Hitachi bought into the Hard drive business by buying IBM's hard drive division. IBM was being sued because of bad quality on the Deskstar (desktop) hard drives, check out http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,67608,src,ov,00.asp. & http://techreport.com/news_reply.x/3494/1.  Best part is a IBM rep was even quoted as saying some of the hard drives are NOT intended for more than 8 hours use per day.

And NO dont think this means only the desktop hard drives are bad.  I work for a large company that has 3K+ computers, all Dell.  About 60% latitude and 40% Optliplex.  When a Optlipex HD dies, 8 out of 10 times its a HItachi (our systems have a mix of Hitachi, WD, Maxtor and a few Seagate). Unforntately most of our latitudes (mainly D600 & C640) have Hitachi HD's, we have people on their 3 HD  (after 18 months of use). 

So Yes I too would love to see the D600 & other Dell model failure rate.