Technology

The only drives I have ever had die on me were actually both WD, but it's all anecdotal, and I've had tons of WD drives that were great (my favorites were the raptors and velociratpers). I've owned way too many HDDs over the many years, and I can say that I haven't had issues with any, but again I do my research and only order from what I believe to be good runs of drives. In case you have never done so, take a look at the reports that Backblaze puts out on their drive reliability. I found it pretty eye opening. Before Backblaze start sharing their data, there used to be a site that crowd sourced HDD lifetimes and failure causes that I used to use when buying drives and I always entered my drive data there. I can't recall the name of it now nor do I know if it still exists, but you could definitely spot the "bad" gens on there and WD and Seagate were both pretty even as far as I recall. I remember Hitachi being statistically worse, but it made sense as they bought IBM's derided Deskstar business from them. Ironically, WD ended up buying Hitachi's HDD business years later, but I think it was considered OK by then.