That's not all that surprising to me, I've had supremely good fortune with drives. I have a Maxtor Fireball that still "works" (though its SMART has failed.) My

That's not all that surprising to me, I've had supremely good fortune with drives. I have a Maxtor Fireball that still "works" (though its SMART has failed.) My current workstation still has drives in it from the three prior workstations; spanning back 7 or 8 years now[1], humming along well outside their warrantied operation. The first disk failure(s) I witnessed came while I worked at a computer repair shop, which would be "a huge N" compared to the number of PCs I've personally owned. My first disk failure on my own personal equipment didn't happen until I built out a home storage array - again a rather large multiplier of number of disks compared to a traditional PC. Even then that failure was because a disk controller got fried, the drive was mechanically sound and the data was completely recoverable. Admittedly my own experience is probably a bit skewed since I don't have a personal laptop. By the time I got a job that provided me w/ a laptop solid state drives were already quite mature. In my experience doing repair work: laptops were a huge source of our failed drive & data recovery operations. [1]: I should note these drives all operate nearly 24/7, no five-nines on my personal equipment though ;-P