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wow, I've been getting HD failures all of a sudden. Unfortunately it was my samples and OS drive clone (2 partition) Toshiba? HD.I saw that coming by disapearing Icons and got that remedied- other than Kontakt 3 libraries not installing- superdrive struggling.

So off to my trusty Quicksilver dual 800 w/ a NON OEM cd/dvd drive to make dmg's.
Now the sample/clone Seagate HD on this machine dies

DU says smart status is failing, and notes save as much as possible and replace the HD.

What the heck??

Not that I'm worried about it too much. But are multiple partitoned HD more prone to fail? I vaguely remember reading somewhere that HFS+ should never be multi partition e.g. more than 1 partition. Though I don't remember the context : older GUID for <2GB volumes or not?

I ALWAYS partition my HDs and rarely have problems - I don't think any have been related to that (more permissions problems and even those have been absent in about the last 5 years).

yeah, must be a koinky dink or Apple karma haunting me to hurry up and get a new puter

I don't regret buying my USED MP 3,1 for a second. It was a lot of $$$ at the time but came with three HDs and two DVD burners. It also came with drives loaded with every conceivable program (including DP, PT, Waves, etc.) all of which I wiped when I got the machine. Call me crazy.... everyone else does. LOL It's been a real workhorse.

I hear you MLC, but sooner or later I'll (we'll) have to move up to a current platform. I wouldn't mind hearing what 96khz is like
How long can a MP4,1 or5,1 last - 5 years? By then all peripherals will changed even further, and I'm already behind hanging on a 1224 hehe

Yeah, the loss of Firewire and the addition of Thunderbolt is good in one sense but the expenditure to "catch up" can be daunting.

A drive that old giving those errors is toast.

Hard drives die. Seagates are more prone to it than others--I stopped replacing them under warranty as the replacements were often worse than the ones I sent in. I tossed out two yesterday. It happens.

Replace it and restore from your Time Machine backup.

If you do not have a recent Time Machine backup or clone, run Apple Disk Utility on the entire drive, not the partitions until it is clean or until you get the exact same errors three times in a row. I've run it over 50 times to get one in good enough shape to pull data. Get your data off of it and replace the drive. The drive is still toast and could fail again in a few hours.

4T hard drives are $175. 1T SSDs can be had around $400. Drives are cheap and much better than the one giving you grief.

But are multiple partitoned HD more prone to fail?

Nope. Nor is there any reason to partition drives anymore unless running different OS on different partitions.