Better hard disk

In this video (from this page .. a little dated but still relevant)

At around 1:40 Steve says

I think that the manufacturers could make a perfect drive for $1000. But they couldn't sell any for $1000. So they're always trying to cram as many bits as they possibly can - competing with each other - and so they're like on the edge of reliability - they're reliable enough. If they fail, WD will send you a new one..

my question is, has anyone found or experienced a high quality drive like this? Or does it not exist at all? Sometimes people talk about "commodity hardware" but I don't really see any "non-commodity" hard disks.

Solution 1:

yes - kind of. they are called raid-1 with hot-spare setups with:

• monitoring of raid state and working alerting system
• surface scan scheduled every couple days

remember that super-hard disk will not protect you against fire / robery etc. so just back up...

i had failed wd raptors [ which are quite decent disks by the way ] after few weeks of use, i had failed 15k rpm sas server drives, i have still working 6GB ide drives.

Solution 2:

There is no such thing as a perfect single drive and there never will be.

A drive constructed from multiple drives would be more resilient, sort of a single-unit RAID arrive like many NAS boxes but smaller, but even then the constituent parts would likely come off the same production line in the same batch so may share any manufacturing deficiency inherent in that one batch.