I'm sure that would've fixed the earlier Windows iterations pretty quickly if the machine would start wailing in blue notes every time something went awry. :-)

About the usefulness of Spinrite, I gather that a minor power flicker would be enough to make an uncomplete write to the disk, which would confuse the drive electronics enough to make it act a bit strange. Thus it might be that the full format might fix the thing. But if they're willing to hand out a new drive as replacement, that works too.

RAID might be handy too, though now the biggest trouble seems to be flaky RAID controllers. ^^;
But then again, there's always something failing with computers. :-)