[Nervous Tick]

>> Which means that for every 1.4 million hard drives sold, only one will burn out during the first hour of operation.

I have had fairly bad luck with WD drives over the years, so that 1 that fails will, no doubt, be mine.

Why don’t you other 1.4 million folks take up a collection and buy me that first one, and then we’ll all be off the hook. ;-)

[ThePythonicCow]

I have had fairly bad luck with WD drives over the years

The economy WD drives (big capacity, low cost) seem to have a mixed record. But the Raptors are a different breed of cat, and really do seem to have better performance and higher reliability than most desktop or laptop drives.

Shrinking the disk platter size makes good sense to me. The primary way to reduce seek times is to reduce seek sizes. A crude way to do this is to just not use half of a drive. But by using a smaller platter, they can get to the higher rotational speeds easier, and get the moving head and arm mechanics simpler, while leaving more space for the cooling. Heat is the primary enemy of disk longevity.

Next time I need some disks, these drives will be at the top of my shopping list. The WD drives I have on my primary PC seem much faster (like perhaps twice; I haven't measured it carefully) than the ordinary Seagate 3.5" desktop drives I use otherwise.

[papasmurf]

It seemed that when the standard warranty was 5 years, I never lost a drive. Then they monkeyed around and went to 1 year, then to 3, and I lost about 5 drives during that time.