Updating the 'puter for hardcore ownage

[Concillian]

Whereas I've had no luck with Seagate but the Western Digitals are all still working fine.:)

Which is why I say (and, as I said, I work for a hard drive company, I have some inside information that supports this) that all companies have failures, they all have some level of "acceptable" discrepant drives that make it to the marrket and fail. The requirements are just too stringent to satisfy demand, capacity, price, and have 100% reliability.

If you look at what people are willing to pay for storage, you realize that this is a necessary evil. You don't see too many people buying a couple hundredths of a percent less failure rate by paying for server level drives instead of desktop level drives.

You are in just as much risk by buying one brand exclusively than by buying a multitude of brands. ALL brands have failures, and they are all about the same rate. At the failure rate typically experienced (somewhere less than 0.x%) the sample size required to be a significant indicator is in the thousands, if not millions of drives. You simply can't get accurate competitive data unless you're Dell or something.

There are some exceptions to these general trends and those are pretty well documented on the internet. The infamous IBM "Deathstar" drives are the most prominent example. There was a 1.6GB WD drive that had a well known failure issue (I got bit by one of these). Thosee kinds of things are also somewhat random, though sometimes a company may release drives that have known issues, I don't think this is generally something that would be done purposefully, as the downsides are far reaching and potentially a name-branding killer for years.