It has been a long standing debate over which major hard drive
manufacturer has the most reliable hard drives. Everybody seems to
have their own opinion based on personal experience, but never based
on fact (At least not that I have seen). Of all manufacturers of hard
drives (ATA/SATA ... no SCSI drives), who makes hard drives with the
smallest failure rate overall? The more recent the facts, the better.

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Clarification of Question by dvati0n-ga on 03 May 2004 07:02 PDT

Thanks to google I found this page...
<a href="http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:_FnULG2l-8MJ:www.calce.umd.edu/whats_new/2003/1203.pdf+hard+drive+%22failure+rates%22&hl=en">Reliability
of Hard Disk Drives</a>

it references terms like...
manufacturers specified mean times between failure (MTBF) 
average mean time to failure (MTTF)

And the author was able to dig up all kinds of information about
manufacturers' MTBF and MTTF rates. I hope this helps any researcher
find more information as the above posted article is slightly
outdated.

Hi dvati0n-ga,

  I am not sure if one could provide such a statistics, since no manufacturer
would like to hear bad about their drives.  Actually the reliability of the
harddrive is a complex issue with the following factors to consider.

i) platter coating/adhesion of the coated material, quality of spindle/head 
material/assembly.
ii) vibration of the platter and the non-uniformity of the platter surface.
iii) vibration characteristics/resonance.
iv) vibration of the head/head alignment over the platter surface.
v) thermal characterics and the associated dimensional changes of the above.
vi) suspended particle count/size within the sealed enclosure.
vii) ability to withstand external vibrations during operation(might need
external shock sensors/associated action by the firmware).
viii) Amount of resonance dampening, ability to identify resonance and
take corrective action.
ix)) drive electronics, mechanics(bearing type), motor etc.
x) Thermal protection, software detection of aging and graceful degradation
in performance.
xi) Ability to correct errors and remap damaged sectors(esp. under situations
of a sudden head crash due to an electrical glitch).
xii) Reliability under particular application(such as heavy thrashing during
non linear video editing/simultaneous parallel access with heavy movement
of the spindle/head.
xiii) Intelligence/quality of the firmware and its limitations.

I feel most of the damaging effects are mitigated through intelligent
software(esp. in the low priced consumer drives) that compromises performance
for data protection.

Regards
ldavinci-ga

While I would be hard pressed to argue with any of that information,
they are all contributors to exactly what I am looking for. In the
past I have seen printed failure rates for some manufacturers.
Somebody, somewhere, somehow, must have had this same question and
found out ... I hope so anyway ...

I had this question yesterday.

Go to
www.storagereview.com
and click "reliability survey" at the top.
Create an account and input information about your experiences with at
least one drive.
Then you will be able to browse their results.
They have survey information from over 25,000 drives of all varieties,
so I consider it a pretty good source for this kind of thing.