Is my hard drive crashing?? Need help.

[SoCalRugger]

OK, I've got a 2nd hard drive that I only use for storing music, movies, and TV shows. It doesn't have an OS or any important or non-replacable files.

A couple weeks ago, a bunch of my MP3s suddenly went missing. In one folder with a bunch of bands from A to Z, everything from Green Day onward suddenly disappeared. This happened in a couple other folders too, such as everything from CCR onward disappearing from my Classic Rock folder.

Last week, I noticed that a couple folders containing TV shows were no longer accessible. When I try to access them, I get the following error message.



I'm guessing clicking Yes would be bad, correct?

I've also been experiencing smaller problems, where two video files in a folder of 20 files will no longer be playable. The rest are fine (for now).

One thing to note is that while the files are disappearing, the amount of memory listed as available from My Computer does not change.

I've never experienced anything like this before. What's the deal? Is my hard drive slowly destroying itself? If so, I'm guessing I should pick up an external hard drive and transfer all the files that are still good, right? This isn't critical, since I can re-download everything I've got on this hard drive, but it's going to be a pain in the ass. Any advice would be appreciated.