Reviews of Hard Drive Reliability?

ewhac asks: "After having three 18G drives go toes-up on me in the last two months, all of them done so after about 40 days of use, I want the replacement drives to be rock-solid. While Tom's Hardware and AnandTech review individual drives and their performance, I haven't yet been able to locate any comprehensive or cohesive review of drive reliability and longevity. Does such a resource exist?"

Comments

resist anecdotal evidence

[Lepruhkawn]

I commend the request for asking for real data.

Anecdotal evidence from people who have had drives of a certain brand fail on them and then say "never use this drive" is basically worthless. Even if you hear 5 or 10 people say that, ignore them.

What you need to know is if there are enough anecdotes to show that the mfgr's MTBF rate is inaccurate and the real rate is a lot lower than what they report (or a lot lower than other mfgr's). Or maybe if there is a certain batch of drives that are anomalous.

The question is: is the mfg's MTBF rate good enough for you and is it accurate?

www.storagereview.com has started a reliability database but I don't know if their data is statistcally valuable yet.