> And as long as your drive is backed up and you trust the backup, then who cares if the failure rate is 1% or 2%? I would choose to pay a premium to reduce th

> And as long as your drive is backed up and you trust the backup, then who cares if the failure rate is 1% or 2%? I would choose to pay a premium to reduce the chance of me needing to restore from backup as often. Not a big premium, but one that makes sense at the one or two drive purchase scale that might make a whole lot less sense at a one or two thousand drive purchase. I'd pay an extra $20 or $30 on a ~$300 drive to drop from a 2% to 1% failure rate... (As it turns out, for home I pretty much buy drives in pairs and mirror them for all my not-in-a-laptop storage - so I guess I pay a 100% premium for reliability...)