Right... that's my point. I had a bad experience with WD once upon a time (multiple drives, all different batches). And when I had to build a ~1TB RAID in 2001, all of my research pointed to Maxtor. Side note: That actually turned out to be a good choice. The drives lasted 5+ years and didn't die until a fan gave out in the drive cage. Poor little guys got too hot and seized up. After all of that, I was still able to pull 99.5% of the data off of them.
What I was trying to get at is that looking at any specific case and making any blanket statements about quality of drives. Ask 5 people what are the best and worst drives and you'll get 5 different answers. We all have horror stories. The only way to know for sure is to have actual population-level data on reliability. Unfortunately, that data is somewhat hard to come by, so we all just rely on anecdotal stories.
It also depends on if we are talking consumer drives, enterprise drives, etc... I doubt that the return rate for drives would actually cover serious data errors which occurred after the return timeframe.
Honestly, the only people who could offer any insight are the large companies with huge datacenters: Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Rackspace, etc... and I doubt you'll hear them talking. If you could, I suspect the answer would be that it really doesn't matter which manufacturer you choose. All of them fail. All of them have bad batches. The best that you can do is try to minimize the MTBF and try to gracefully replace failed drives as soon as possible.
Honestly, the only people who could offer any insight are the large companies with huge datacenters
Yup, this gives you good insights into the 'current' crop. We've got about 15,000 drives in our Santa Clara data center at Blekko (mostly enterprise SATA, 2TB (WD), but some 1TB (Seagate) too) In large populations like that I prefer to keep one family, which I know folks decry a monoculture but that keeps the failure rate more consistent across all drives which helps manage replacing them.
I have an interest in this and am trying to build up a disk survey system to try and learn about this in the open, it's still not up yet but you can subscribe for an announcement and read some thoughts at http://disksurvey.org/
Right... that's my point. I had a bad experience with WD once upon a time (multiple drives, all different batches). And when I had to build a ~1TB RAID in 2001, all of my research pointed to Maxtor. Side note: That actually turned out to be a good choice. The drives lasted 5+ years and didn't die until a fan gave out in the drive cage. Poor little guys got too hot and seized up. After all of that, I was still able to pull 99.5% of the data off of them.
What I was trying to get at is that looking at any specific case and making any blanket statements about quality of drives. Ask 5 people what are the best and worst drives and you'll get 5 different answers. We all have horror stories. The only way to know for sure is to have actual population-level data on reliability. Unfortunately, that data is somewhat hard to come by, so we all just rely on anecdotal stories.
It also depends on if we are talking consumer drives, enterprise drives, etc... I doubt that the return rate for drives would actually cover serious data errors which occurred after the return timeframe.
Honestly, the only people who could offer any insight are the large companies with huge datacenters: Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Rackspace, etc... and I doubt you'll hear them talking. If you could, I suspect the answer would be that it really doesn't matter which manufacturer you choose. All of them fail. All of them have bad batches. The best that you can do is try to minimize the MTBF and try to gracefully replace failed drives as soon as possible.