Firstly, welcome to two new posters.

Richard, the only time you ever need to panic is if your drive fails and you have no backup to recover from. The drive, in question, might fail one day. I don't imagine your specific drive is any less reliable than any other. Of course, we only ever hear the bad news stories don't we? I've got a couple of Maxtor's and they've both proved to be bullet-proof for the last threee years. So whether you need to panic or not depends entirely on your backup strategy. So what are you doing at the moment to backup/archive your data?

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