Either you're lucky or you just have not had that many drives around... The first to fail was a Miniscribe 5¼" 20MB, it died after a week. I replaced it with a

Either you're lucky or you just have not had that many drives around... The first to fail was a Miniscribe 5¼" 20MB, it died after a week. I replaced it with a 3½" Seagate connected to an Adaptec RLL controller - this being before IDE was a thing the controller decided the encoding scheme and RLL gave you 50% extra storage space. This Seagate never died on me, I probably have it around somewhere still. Then came the Western Digital IDE drives, two of those died and took ~250MB of data with them to data heaven. They were followed by another WD, this one 1.2GB - it died. When I built a system around the famous Abit BP-6 motherboard I put in two Maxtor drives - which I should not have done, one of them died within 2 years. Meanwhile I'd helped my father get a new drive, one of those fancy IBM Deskstars. Within a year it had turned itself into a Deathstar like most of its brethren seem to have done. Then there was the 10 GB Travelstar which died, then the 20GB Travelstar which also died - but survived the canoe expedition over the Yukon safely tucked away into the water- and probably bulletproof solar-powered Virgin Webplayer I had made to document the 3½ month trip - and the 20GB Toshiba. The 2TB WD Green, dead. One of the 1TB WD Greens, dead - but its mate still running strong at a 120.000+ running hours with its 2TB brand mates coming in second at 100.000+ hours. In the DS4243 array I have replaced 5 15K 600GB drives, good that these were cheap as dirt (but take quite a bit of power to run, hence the low price). Notice that I have not had a Seagate drive die on me yet. There are a few in an array somewhere here but those still do their job even though they're quite old by now. Maybe I'm just lucky in that I never bought any of the failing types since these problems seem to be related to specific types.