<p>Early on, when I switched my desktop PC to Ubuntu, I had a trouble with one of my harddisks. I had an 80GB SATA drive as my primary drive (which was initially in Windows). I had to bear with the difficulty of data loss. Since it was still under warranty, I managed to get some of the data in it by making it a secondary disk and grabbing its contents from the Ubuntu OS. </p>
Having used it for almost a year, I thought that it might have been worn out or so, that's why it finally gave up. I believe so, because a day won't pass without that machined being booted up and used for almost 12-18 hours in a day. Just awhile ago, I stumbled upon an article that discusses dangers of using Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon distros for hard disks. What a coincidence to be reading this article, when I was just upgrading my distro to Gutsy Gibbon release!
Anyway, I'll watch out for this bug/ticket to be closed. For you guys out there, read on.. and find some shelter in their tips and tricks.
http://www.linux-hero.com/rant/explanation-ubuntu-hard-drive-wear-and-tear
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/137420
For now, I'll be on Windows.. but for sure to still be using opensource tools! 