From personal experience I would trust neither to be infallible. I remember the IBM Deathstar drives, my Maxtor drives repeatedly dying along with their RMA rep

From personal experience I would trust neither to be infallible. I remember the IBM Deathstar drives, my Maxtor drives repeatedly dying along with their RMA replacements & the issues Seagate seems to have with 1.5TB & 3TB drives. When was the last time you had an SSD die from a dead motor or crashed heads? Do you have intimate knowledge of the firmware writing process for hard drive manufacturing? Do you think knobs aren't twisted and codebases aren't rewritten to take into account the changes required for the latest in magnetic storage? Geometry calculations for perpendicular and shingled media is less complicated than a flash translation layer? Also just because something is old and hasn't broken yet, doesn't mean it's well written, bug free or will work in the future. This isn't to say that hard drives are reliable, as they're notoriously the least reliable thing in your computer.