I agree with you to a point. In one of my old retail jobs (1997), we sold IDE hard drives from WD, Fujitsu, and Samsung. Never had a single WD fail, but many of the Fujitsu and Samsung drives failed on their first use (bad sectors during format, with more bad sectors during each successive format). At my next job (1997 to 2004), we used Seagate SCSI drives exclusively in our servers, despite the fact that the drives consistently had a 33-50% DOA rate (either wouldn't power up or wouldn't be detected by the controller).

My first personal computer (1992) had a Seagate IDE hard drive that failed after just over a year. Since then, I have personally had IDE drives from Maxtor and WD fail, both DOA and after use. Last year, I built two servers using WD's 150GB Raptor drives, and 2 out of 8 were DOA (they would spin up, but wouldn't be detected by the RAID controller). I've used and seen enough drives from enough companies to know that the quality of all drives is next-to-nothing nowadays, and that you simply cannot equate a manufacturer's name (or reputation) with quality. Back in the 90s you could, but not today. Having said, I'll never use or recommend a Seagate, Samsung, or Fujitsu drive. You know what the they say about first impressions.

@Chris C: Funny thing about the new Raptors and, to a certain extent, the RE2s. Some of them simply will not negotiate with SATA 150 controllers without the jumper in place (pins 5&6 of the feature block off the top of my head), giving the impression of a DOA drive, yet some will work perfectly without it. I have an RE2 sitting on the bench right now that refuses to work correctly (LBA timeouts, looks terribly like bad sectors) with a Via (ick!) based southbridge, yet sticking it into my test box and running WD's own diagnostics, along with smartctl and testdisk on BSD, shows the thing to be perfectly healthy. One wonders just how many of these "failures" are due to poor HBAs, cabling and power issues. When designing servers myself, I usually use HBAs such as the Highpoint or Areca to ensure this doesn't present a problem.

That said, I'm sure you've covered all of this yourself, so I don't doubt for one second that you have had actual failures. I found the WD Proteges (usually fitted to OEM kit. They're not that common) to be probably the worst series for returns, although it was nowhere near the level of incompetence you suspect when a whole batch of Seagates (this is recent) with the place of manufacture indicated as China ALL coming back as faulty within days. As you say, there are failures with all manufacturers these days, as Storage Review's database clearly shows, but I think it's fair to eschew a particular brand when they show the levels of incompetence that Maxtor-Seagate and Fujitsu have in the past, especially when it makes you look incompetent yourself to the non-technical.

Again this is personal experience, but I have seen a total of one failed Samsung Spinpoint, probably due to not having used or shifted too many of them. This was due to someone thinking the breather was a "reset button" and prodding it with a pin. No matter how idiot-proof you try to make something, nature still seems to be ahead with the idiots :o)