What brand(s) of hard disk has the lowest failure rates? [closed]

Interestingly, Google published a study that looked at a pretty large population of drives and their failure rates. One section says, and I quote:

"In contrast to age-related results, we note that all results shown in the rest of the paper are not affected significantly by the population mix."

The authors found that drives tended to fail (1) very soon after their first reported SMART scan error and (2) based more on the drive model number and vintage rather than manufacturer.

The issue with this question is that there are good drive models for a manufacturer and bad drive models.

For example, there seems to be a high failure rate for the Seagate 1tb & 1.5tb drives, but their 250gb & 320gb drives are solid*. Yet the Western Digital 1tb, 1.5tb, & 2tb drives seem more stable, but there have been issues with their 500gb drives*.

The answers to this question should address more of the good drive models, not the actual manufacturers themselves.

Thanks! JFV

**Information for this data was obtained from ratings on websites like NewEgg.com, TigerDirect.com, etc*

StorageReview.com stores reliability rates for hundreds of drives. You can view by manufacturer and see which drives have been reported to be reliable or failure-prone. The data is mostly user submitted (perhaps even by SF peers) with 52900 entries to date. At least you get numbers:

StorageReview's Survey

Registration is free, and you must enter at least one drive result but you get to view the entire database.

EDIT: Regarding Google, they used Hitachi Deskstars in one of their Data Centers at one point: alt text http://www.hyperslug.com/image/photo/GoogleServerLarge.jpg Courtesy of CNET