The brand usually doesn’t matter so much as the model, according to Google. I’ve been buying Samsung hard drives, oddly enough, and so far they’ve all lasted beyond their 3 year warranties despite decently heavy use.

My knee jerk is to point at a laptop’s poor cooling, but I doubt that’s valid. Did you see that recent study that showed that laptops on average are actually more reliable than a typical desktop? That doesn’t seem to be my experience. We go through laptops much faster than desktops. But at least desktops are more repairable when something DOES go wrong, so maybe that’s why they last longer as a whole here.

Anyway, that really sucks. Incidentally I have this backup hard drive that failed to load through USB and I’m scared to test it internally. 🙁 I keep duplicates of most things, but I don’t overbuy hard drive storage, which is probably a mistake. I should really setup a server or something. I’m just always doing things barebones to save money.