I have an Acer Extensa 4620z laptop with a 143GB SATA hard drive. The serial number I believe is WDC WD1600BEVS-22RST0-(S1). I've experienced systems freezes, and I'm afraid it's a sign of a hard drive going bad.

At first, I had Hardy Heron installed on this laptop and I've experienced a time when the entire system just freezes/locks up and the cursor won't move when I wiggle the mouse. Also, any music I had playing just replays as if it's stuck in an infinite loop. An example is when I'm playing a song like "Blah Yeah! Blah Yeah! Bl-bl-bl-bl-bl-bl-bl" and that just goes on. The only thing I can do is to hard reset. After the laptop shuts down, I press the power button again and the system comes up just fine. It's only happened on Hardy Heron about 3 times total within about a month's time.

This is a bit off topic, but I updated to Intrepid Ibex and I just couldn't stand it because of the performance issue. Everything ran slower even though I KNOW I had plenty of memory (2GB with Pentium Dual Core). But back to the subject; the system froze 2 times, within 20 minutes! That drove me over the edge to switch back. This usually happens when I'm either using the computer on an average basis, or when I just have a media player playing (Audacious) music and just Nautilus open for music. So today I reformatted and installed and went back to Hardy Heron, and everything seems to be perfectly fine.

Is this a sign of a hard drive failure coming? I have all of my data (pictures, text files, etc.) backed up on a flash drive, and my music on my iPod, so I'm prepared for a storm, if any.