If I ask that question to a number of people, I have a feeling I would get all sorts of answers. I think, Hard Disk reliability doesn’t necessarily depends on the manufacturer but it also depends on how it has been treated in a machine. In my opinion, a HDD in a machine with multiple power cuts would most likely have a short lifespan than one run with proper care.
Lets talk about the Manufacturer…
People have preference when it comes to HDD Manufacturer. When it comes to the manufacturer, I tend to go for Western Digital (WD) and solely because I had less bad experience with it compared to Maxtor…
I am not saying WD drives never fails, in fact I do have an old WD 80GB IDE drive here which died this morning; but it does have low percentage of failure.
Why does it die?
One person actually asked me this question and the answer is very simple. Any electronic equipment, or any functioning part will die at one point, its the same as human body, it all depends on how its been treated the background of it. When it comes to HDD, its the manufacturer.
How to stop a HDD from dying?
You can’t and you never know when it’s going to die, same as a human being… You never know when you are going to die. It all comes down to to proper care and how its been treated. For example, do not shut your machine down by pulling the plug, it WILL kill the HDD at one point! If you want to shut it down without doing it via the Operating System, press and hold the Power Button for 10 seconds and it should shut the machine down.
Conclusion
Treat a HDD like it is going to die the next minute and back it up on a regular basis. If you don’t have any important information on the disk, then it not a problem. You could either manually back it up on another drive, setup RAID on machine or even back it up to a remote server.