Hard Drive Failure Rates - Whats Up?

[jaydes44]

Looking for new hard drive, BUT keep reading horrible reviews on hard drive failure rates (all brands, almost 50%) at ALL online stores, including the egg, for the past several months. People reporting DOA or failure after short periods like one week to a few months.

Another indicator of the high failure rate is the 1 year warranties most drives now have. I seem to remember 5 year warranties as common.

I'm thinking it's fallout from the Thailand floods, but my goodness, why are there NO articles or reviews discussing the matter.

I just can't believe I can't find ANYTHING about this at ANY online computer magazine or hardware site.

Is there some big conspiracy? Or am I missing something? Why is this not being discussed anywhere in more detail?

 

[becolt]

I just went through the same thing last week while researching to buy a new external (got a thread on here right now trying to recover data from a seagate). It's truly amazing how high the failure rate seems to be, but at the same time you've got to keep in mind that the dissatisfied customer will be more likely to write a review.
What I ended up doing was selecting 4 or 5 drives that fit my requirements and price, then going to amazon/new egg/etc and putting a hash mark under each drive for 5/4 star and 1/2 star reviews, giving me a succeed/fail ratio. That narrowed it down enough that I was able to decide between either the 1 or 2tb versions of the "Iomega eGo desktop." Went with the 1tb because it had a slightly better ratio.

The worst ratios I saw were on WD and Seagate drives, which incidentally seem to be the most popular. There's probably a correlation there.
B.