Hard drive reliability study

I've had 2 seagate and 1 hitachi fail on me, but I've still bought them after that. I also believe it's luck, so just choose the one that suits my needs based on price/performance... And normally the sammys or hitachi's win.

I've never actually owned a WD now that I think about it... :)
 
In more than two decades and well over a hundred HDDs (lost count years ago) I recall only four drive failures (Maxtor, Seagate, WD, and a Tosh 2.5-incher). My hardest working drives have been IBM/Hitachis, followed more recently by 2TB WDs. I still have about 70 working drives lying around gathering dust.

A lot depends on how you treat 'em. Taps, knocks and bumps when powered on can be calamitous, but the biggest killer is thermal cycling, which is why I keep all main systems running 24x7. I still shake my head in astonishment at the incredible capacities, low price points and amazing reliability of today's drives. Still, I'm obessive-compulsive about backups ... the reason I'm online right now is because I'm killing time while doing a weekly backup to two external 2TB drives, the fourth backup this week of the same stuff to different drives/locations. It's only in the past 5 years or so that having enough disk space hasn't been the Big Problem it used to be in the early days.
 
If the WD takeover of Hitachi goes ahead we could be looking at only two suppliers in the future - WD and Seagate. I'm sure that this will not be a positive development for consumers either in terms of competition or available choices. Here is a list of defunct hard drive manufacturers which shows just how much the industry has evolved ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers
 
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There's also Fujitsu, who were bought out by Toshiba so go by that name now. They still produce drives.
 
Seagate FTW! well, the 7200.12 series :) (the 7200.11 series were an unfortunate event, I think Seagate won't be making any mistakes again soon.)

+ I still have a 160gig Seagate hdd in perfect working condition. Thats like 7years ago...
 
I've had Seagate's, WD's, Samsung's and Hitachi's and each have failed as randomly as the next. Besides the 7200.11 issue I haven't found one manufacturer that failed more than another.
 
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