I mentioned previously that I upgraded the hard drives in my and my wife's Sony VAIO VGN A-190 laptops to WD2500BEVE. Well, mine just died. FAIL! Less than 8 months. Not sure yet the failure mode, but I can read stuff without any reported error, but a lot of stuff appears to be corrupt (by archive testing). Also SpinRite reads along for a while and then stops with some sort of error screen. This is the fifth time I've tried to use this software with zero results. FAIL! I've taken the drive out (look [here] for disassembly instructions with pictures - I need to add pictures for HDD removal), hooked it up to another machine and copied off what I could. Warranties for WDC drives are usually 3yrs, so I'm sending it in to be replaced. I wish I could pay a bit extra to get the new WD3200BEVE which, to my amazement, is now the new capacity king in the PATA 9.5mm laptop drive kingdom -- I didn't expect any manufacturer would continue to develop new hardware for this interface. My really big complaint is with Windows security. When attaching a foreign drive the security prevents you from reading many directories, but, of course, this is a twist-tie security measure because you can simply take ownership and grant yourself rights to these directories, but this means writing to the drive -- FAIL -- a big no-no on a failing drive. I did it anyway, and I recovered what I needed to recover and I'm running again on my old stock 80GB drive, but I think the world needs a solution to this problem, so I intend to figure it out. I'll follow up when I find it.