No, you're missing my point. Consumer hard drives are unreliable because consumers would rather save a few dollars rather than pay for a reliable system. That

No, you're missing my point. Consumer hard drives are unreliable because consumers would rather save a few dollars rather than pay for a reliable system. That's one end of the spectrum. The other end is, say a bank, where databases are backed up remotely in conjunction with high-reliability RAID drives to achieve a very high level of reliability. It's not that we aren't capable of designing systems that are reliable, but rather that we don't value the reliability as much as it costs. And that's because even a crappy consumer drive is 'good enough' for most people, unreliability and all. If it's not, we put in some sort of a back-up system to mitigate the risk. In the early days of computers, that just wasn't so. If you're old enough, you probably remember having a C64 game on a cassette that you just couldn't get to load. Or a floppy disk that became corrupted because it got heated to over 50°C and some bits got jumbled. Go back even further when only prototypes of these devices existed in labs, and the situation was even worse. Well, most software is more akin to the prototype in the lab than a product on a shelf. It hasn't been thoroughly tested, it is still under development, we don't understand the limitations of the system, etc etc etc.