HDD issues

During the last three weeks I have had several HDD;s failing. What it might be that makes HDD;s cause DMA errors, I do not know. R/W on specific sectors on one of my workstation disks caused a core dump. The same thing happened to my old reliable Pentium 3 last Wednesday. I have lost some minor data, but recovering it is tedious. And now a pretty old 8.1Gb drive in another computer has begun to cause DMA errors. Nothing serious yet but taking last weeks errors into account I am worried. I am running dangerously low on HDD;s and I have promised to set up a CVS server for a bunch of students. *sigh* I might have to purchase a new one, less food, more hardware.

And this is what happens to HDD;s that don't behave...