I'm currently working on a project to assess laptop hard drive failure
rates.  I need additional information on the average (whether it's
vendor or independent study) laptop hard drive failure rate.  This
information can be average time to failure and/or failure rate in X
number of years.  *Bonus* If you have information on failure rates by
vendor (IBM, Samsung, Maxtor, ext) it would be appreciated (and more
rewarding).

1. I'm not aware of this data being available. Usually, vendors don't
release these details about their products because it's considered
proprietary information.

2. Exactly what do you mean by "failure rates"? Do you mean soft
failures or hard failures or both or a subset of either? There are
alot of things that can be considered a "failure". Sometimes the
system can recover from it (soft), sometimes not (hard).

Check out this website. It might give you some good general
information about hard drive failures.

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/qual/specMTBF.html

JtB()