Recently my hard drive count peaked at 25 with capacities ranging between 320GB to 1.5TB. All were 7200.11 and 7200.12 Seagate Barracuda drives. Up to then, I'd been quite fortunate and had never had a hard drive fail. While Seagate was my favorite at the time, I've had hard drives from Seagate, Hitachi, IBM, Western Digital, and my all-time favorite - Micropolis.

So far this year, the body count includes three 1.5TB, two 1TB, and three 320GB drives. All of them Seagate drives. Two of them with the dreaded click-of-death out of the box, both 1.5TB drives. For replacements, I have one Western Digital 2TB Green, three Western Digital 2TB MyBooks, one Western Digital 500GB Passport, and two Western Digital 300GB VelociRaptors. So far, not a single problem with the Western Digital drives.

To be fair, one of the failures might have been due to a defect in a power cable's connector, or it could have been due to a defect drive's power connector. Amazingly, after some surgery, the drive spun back up for while. For a fantastic video on hard drive repair, see Advanced Hard Drive Data Recovery on YouTube.