Who makes the best disk drives?

[Lady Fitzgerald]

...

How smart is SMART?
Not very, as Google found, and many in the industry already knew. SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) captures drive error data to predict failure far enough in advance so you can back up. Yet SMART focuses on mechanical failures, while a good deal of a disk drive is electronic, so SMART misses many sudden drive failure modes, like power component failure. The Google team found that 36% of the failed drives did not exhibit a single SMART-monitored failure. They concluded that SMART data is almost useless for predicting the failure of a single drive.

Source

Another argument for keeping frequent, current backups! I trust all drives nowhere near as far as I can throw them.

 

[LMiller7]

For me SMART does have value but we must never rely on it. You always need backups regardless the age of the drive or the lack of SMART warnings. If a drive begins to show serious warnings it is probably time to replace it, before it actually fails. A sudden failure may occur at a very inconvenient time.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

For me SMART does have value but we must never rely on it. You always need backups regardless the age of the drive or the lack of SMART warnings. If a drive begins to show serious warnings it is probably time to replace it, before it actually fails. A sudden failure may occur at a very inconvenient time.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Luck of the draw?

It seems to be totally random.

I prefer Western Digital to Seagate, as a result of the problems my housemate experienced.
He had 3 Seagate SATA HDDs fail within ~12 months (a few years ago).

Ironically, he bought me a Seagate 320 GB IDE HDD in 2007 and that one still works.

I haven't had any problems with Western Digital, apart from the "8 second" parking issue.

IMO, it is a stupid setting to have on a desktop HDD.
I disabled the timer on my older WD Green HDDs (WD10EAVS, WD15EARS, WD20EARX).

It seems that you can't disable it on the new model (WD20EZRX) so I had to settle for setting it to 5 minutes.

A sudden failure may occur at a very inconvenient time.

They usually do.