My experience:

I worked telephone tech support for two different mail order computer companies.  The 
first one sold 
junk and is now out of business.  The second one sold only quality components and in 
fact rejected 
95% of the hardware sent to it for evaluation.  I was part of the eval team as the 
support phone lines 
didn't ring too often.  For four years I worked for a computer rental company.  When I 
started there, a 
large affordable drive was 420MB.  When I quit a large affordable drive was 2GB.  
During the last two 
years there I was in charge of repairs.  This means I got to deal with Seagate, 
Fujitsu, Samsung, 
Quantum, Western Digital, Conner, and probably others.  Now I work as a Network 
Administrator with 
200+ nodes to support.

Seagate was the most infuriating to deal with.  If the drive serial number indicated 
that the drive was 
sold as part of a system, they would not replace it, period.  You had to go through 
the OEM of the 
system.  As we bought systems all over the country and often moved drives between 
systems, there 
are some drives that I never got replaced.

Fujitsu was and is the easiest to deal with.  They have a no-questions-asked 
replacement policy.  
You tell them the serial number of the defective drive and they replace it.

Maxtor had the most compatibility problems.  If you called Maxtor tech support they 
would tell you 
which undocumented jumpers to change on their drives to make them compatible.

Failure rates:

Maxtor:  near 100% failed
WD:  near 100% failed
Quantum:  70% failed
Samsung:  50% failed
Seagate:  20% failed except the ST1080A 100% failed
Fujitsu:  2% failed

The Western Digital drives that we had at permanent locations did not fail.
Some of the really old 40MB and 80MB IDE drives never failed.

These figures are approximate from memory as I no longer have the documentation to 
support them.

We had 200 - 300 of each of these brands of drives.
They were used in the harshest environment I can think of:
1. Rental computers get shipped all over the country and take a beating.
2. Large, short-term rental orders were filled by packing 100+ computers in the back 
of a truck, often 
with no padding, and driving them to and from the site.
3. The customers don't care if they damage the hardware.

This rental company no longer exists.  They decided to call it quits when the Pentium 
II's came out 
as they did not want to invest in another 1000 computers.  So they sold their customer 
list to another 
rental company and sold off all their inventory.


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