Reliable? Hardly
Ah, the good ol' IBM Deathstar...
I've bought three Maxtor drives, and my boss bought two, over the last year, and only one has not failed on us. The Samsung drive in my OS/2 system is dying. Our IBM Netfinity tower has had two drives (out of four) die in the last two years, and a third drive has developed about half a meg of bad sectors. Hell, even one of our Adaptec RAID controllers has fried, and took two more hard drives with it!
Quantum and Hitachi sold off their HD divisions, and I believe Fujitsu is getting out of the HD market due to massive failure rates. I've been very lucky with Western Digital drives, but I'm sure my new 1200JB will blow up any day now. ;-)
My A1200 has an 85 MB Maxtor. The thing is loud as a whistle, but it's lasted over ten years now with no bad sectors.
What's with the high failure rate? Well, I heard it's not because of mechanical problems (with the exception of the Deathstar, which has crummy bearings). I hear it's the electronics. Form factor prevents manufacturers from using heatsinks on the chips, and they DO get pretty damn hot. Putting a heatsink or cooler on the hard drive doesn't make much sense if the IC's are overheating. I keep all my drives well-cooled, and still I get plenty of disk deaths.
It's a fair point. Manufacturers - all of them - are cutting costs so drives in general are becoming less reliable.
Time to market is a culprit, too. I remeber reading an IBM tech arcticle where drive technology was taking 6 years to get from experimental research to market, and now the product cycle is closer to 18 months or less.
Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!
I only use CDRs for permanent storage, never for backups.
I used to say the same thing for 250MB tape drives! The damn things never held data. Of course, CD-R's are having problems, too. "Laser rot" is a big problem, and every now and then I have a customer bring in a CDROM where the metal layer is peeling off the disk, and that's for good brands like PNY and TDK!
I just make multiple copies of my backups, and never throw any of them away. You can't trust any media, really.