Community poll forum: Do you think today's hard drives are less reliable?

I have two RAID arrays and a 5 disk Thecus NAS attached to my soho network with a Mac Mini dual drive server. I've had the usual horror stories about the drive that arrived working and died two days later after it was loaded for years (note, not limited to that particular event).

What's happened on the RAID servers is more trouble. The Thecus got 5 Seagate ES2 enterprise grade 1 TB HDs, damned expensive compared to standard issue. They have all failed plus one. FWIW, everything is UPSed and we have full redundant power generator with clean power. Two refurbished drives died just outside their warranty. The accumulated errors brought the raid 5 array down to one non-working drive, and then one degraded drive before the first (a refurb). This destroyed the RAID but fortunately it was mostly backed up. It's since been rebuilt with lower end drives and has been running fine. The Seagate 5900rpm drives in one RAID has been kicking without trouble for two years. The other just came on. We've had more trouble with WD than I want to think about.

You said alot when you said Seagate of all the hard drives i've used these are the least reliable. Western digital, are as good as they have always been, I like SSD hard drives, the prices still need to fall a little more, and do not defragment an SSD hard drive..

Crash2100 pretty well sums it up in a nutshell. We used to shutdown computers and drives, the drives ran slower, and less useage when they did run. Todays equipment and use is hard on them. When the pockets of the manufactures get full enough, the technoogy will get to the pont of making solid state drives more afforadable and common. i believe this will solve some of the failure issues.

I have a very mainstream and 6 year old Dell 520 dimension PC with 2 HDD SATA 250GB WD . Last year the Windows HDD died on me after 6 years of loyal service (lucky me, I had plenty of backups) and I bought a new Western Digital SATA 320GB drive, reinstalled Windows (XP) put my saved stuff back in and it is running well. It should since it is only 6 months old and I have a 2 year warranty. So, I think a 6 year old drive is not too bad, I really can't tell you anything about my new 6 months old baby! My second HDD is 5 years old,full of Linux and still going strong. This topic shows one important thing: Backup!!!