TheDewd said:
I am a Western Digital fan.
WD drives are pretty much the Behringer of the hard drive world---they're cheap, functional, and noisy.
I've never lost a Maxtor, but I've only owned a couple. They've been reliable for me, but note that there's a caveat now that they bought Quantum....
I've only lost one really, really old Seagate (a used drive that was DOA when I got it and wouldn't spin up). Other than that, I had two 9 GB Seagate SCSI drives, one of which was in continuous duty from 1999 until I retired the machine last year, the other of which is still in continuous use and has been since about 1997. That sums up my opinion of Seagate.
Oh, I had one 9 GB 5.25" Seagate drive that I think I may have killed, but it's unclear whether that was the fault of the drive, the machine, or something wrong with the dedicated computer power supply I had to use to keep the thing spinning....
But I'm going to ignore that drive, as I can't be certain that it really failed. It was time to retire the old Quadra anyway.
I've never lost a WD, but I've seen a very high rate of acoustic failure with them (when the bearings get so noisy it hurts to be in the same room). In theory, this will likely eventually result in a bearing lock-up failure (like stiction but with far less risk of head damage when you hit it with a baseball bat to make the drive spin up), but none of these drives have actually failed yet.
My highest percentage of drives were Quantum drives, which now make up about half of Maxtor's line. If I were guessing, I probably saw about a 75% failure rate within the first three years on those drives, which is why I'm very careful about which Maxtor models I buy to avoid any drives whose design came from Quantum.
I've also had one drive failure (sudden appearance of bad blocks) on an 80GB 7200RPM IBM Deskstar (now Hitachi), but that was a cheap PC I built myself, which didn't have very good cooling and sat in a hot server closet with no real ventilation. Even still, other drives in the same enclosure survived, so I can only assume that either the drive was faulty to begin with or IBM/Toshiba drives are more heat sensitive than one would ideally like.
Oh, and my IBM Travelstar in my old PowerBook experienced acoustic failure after about a year. IBM replaced it, and the new drive is still quiet after a couple of years of use, so it was probably just a fluke.
Big thing to remember: buy drives with fluid bearings. And WD's fluid bearing drives are loud by comparison, even when new, so if you want silence, by fluid bearing drives from someone else.
