Scary sounds from my hard drive

[pjalne]

Can't say I've noticed any lack of performance. The disk is about a year old, and has about 4 gigs of free space on the primary partition.

If this thing should break down, is there a way to access its contents by hooking it up to another computer? Of course, if sectors get all fucked up there's not much to do about that, but could the information stored in the healthy bits be extracted? I'm gonna update the safety copies on my portable drive just in case, but I don't have enough lifeboats for everything I need to hang on to.