Another Day, Another Drive

I was working on some Excel sheets last week on my flight back from Denver, when all of a sudden the computer  starts to work REALLY slow. After 10-20 seconds the screen freezes and I got a blue screen. When I tried to reboot the BIOS simply said that there is no hard drive in the laptop . I ran the BIOS diagnostics and got the following error:

Start DST Short Test
Test Results: Fail
Error Code: 1000-0141
Message: No Drive Detected

I researched a little online and I saw that it is pretty common and it means pretty much that you are fu@k3d. After a short online support session with Dell, they sent me a new hard disk to replace the current one. The good news is that they sent me a 120GB drive (the one I had was 100GB), the bad news it that this is a refurbished drive which probably died before on someone else and it's only time before it dies again...

This is the 3rd or 4th hard disk to die on me in the last 3 years. It is really annoying and it always comes in the worse time after I didn't backup in a while. This time I lost a month and a half of documents and emails . Since I travel all the time and the hard disk is very sensitive to all the movements, all I can do is make sure I backup daily or at least weekly until the next time the hard disk dies or until the solid state drives go down in price. Right now the 128GB drives are about $3,220 while the 64GB are about $1,500. I read good reviews on SyncBack which is a  free application that allows you to  schedule incremental backups to make the process a little faster.