Have you checked SMART status? You can do this with Disk Warrior (you don't have to boot from the DW CD to do it; launch the copy of DW on your hard drive instead).
Or if you don't have $100 to spend on a third party utility you can check the S.M.A.R.T. status with Disk Utility which comes with every version of OS X.
The drive is not too old….ryckmachine was purchased in 2009 and we're not heavy users.
Disk drives can and do fail right out of the box. In fact the most exhaustive
test of hard drive failure was conducted by Google Labs and found high or low usage failures were more likely to occur in the first six months of use. It also found S.M.A.R.T. tests are a poor indicator of drive health. The best indicator of impending drive failure is a surface scan. For that you will probably need TechTool Pro or Drive Genius.
