Laptop Hard drives

[Beest]

Monsters laptop is throwing up a "your hard drive has errors and is about to die' window every few minutes.

I'm shopping replacement hard drives and see only two choices of brand Western Digital and Seagate.
Does either of these have a better reputation, user reviews on NewEgg and generally positive for both, with some complaints of short life for both, WD seems to be worse though.

5400 rpm drives 320 GB are $45-$50 from Seagate or WD and come with a 2 yr warranty.

I am also seeing a WD Scorpio black 7200 rpm with 5 yr warranty for $60, besides higher performance does the higher end prouct and warranty promise more reliabilty form this drive, worth the extra few bucks?

I don't think we are in the market for a cool SSD or SSHD in a nealry 3 year old laptop.

I beleive the swap should be fairly simple.

Back up data.
Create new restore discs ( I have these from when it was new, but one make fresh ones anyway)
Open door on botom and remove HD, slot in new one.
Put in restore discs and turn on, will boot from disc and re image the HD as factory new install.

If I am wrong here, or there is a better way I can manage plaease ket me know or any other helpful hints.


Is it possible to run some kind of repair utility and fix the drive, quarantine errors etc. I don't think the error it is reporting is bad sectors, but just that it is about to die.