Anyone else having hard drive problems with their 1520's?

I've had to have my hard drive replaced 4 times over the past year I've owned my Dell. I don't really mind it that much as I have a really good backing-up system, but it's still a definite annoyance. The problems started when my organic chemistry book dropped from 4 feet up (EEEK) onto my open laptop near the hard drive enclosure.

The laptop stopped working immediately, and I got a new drive. Then the new drive worked for a few months, then again it stopped working. I began to trace the problem to a software problem: Sleep. That's right, I was finding that my hard drive began to malfunction when the computer was coming out of sleep. So for my 3rd hard drive replacement, I just turned off all sleep functionality on my laptop and used hibernate only. This seemed to work great, until a few days ago I left my laptop on without closing the lid, for 16 hours. Apparently this triggered some sort of sleep mechanism again as my hard drive crapped out again.

I'm getting my new HD in a few days and I'm going to set the same settings on it: NO SLEEP. Hopefully this will last for the rest of the laptop's life as long as I don't leave it on 16 hours straight. I was wondernig if anyone had any problems with hard drive errors on their 1520?

 

Also, what does Dell do with the hard drives that you send back to them? I assume they destroy them?

 

bump, any ideas?