Do SATA drives have a history of frequent failures compared to their PATA brethren? In the past month, I have lost 3 SATA's on 2 different computers while my old PATA's are still spinning. Drives were both Seagate and WD. Seems I have to upgrade for reliability, but which would be better: solid state or SCSI (have on board connectors)? Frustrating that I have to keep swapping drives.
In general, the failure rate of a disk drive is related to the quality of its heads, platters and supporting manufacturing processes, not to its interface. All electronics equipment is subject to ACCEPTED 5% failure rate in the industry.
I have never (in 6 years) had a hard disk fail on me (I have about 7). Most all are WD. I've owned mostly SATA few IDE. If there is an issue with a HDD, it was from the beginning. I would recommend switching brands or going SSD if you can afford it. No moving parts = faster and longer life (theoretically).
OP - are these large HDD or small? 5400, 7200 or 10krpm? I usually buy re-manufactured drives (but I can buy direct) because they have been "burned in" more or "better" IMO and because I believe that the quality control is better since someone who has returned a DOA drive won't take a second one lightly. http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/ I have two of those ^^ (an old one and a new one) and I've never (yet) had a single drive failure in any of them yet I've had 3 HDD failures in my netbook over the course of 18 months. I'm curious to learn what drives you have that are failing.
I had 3 Seagate 500 GBs fail in less than a year where as 4 WDs never had a problem & 2 of them ( 250 GBs) are 6 years old. Mechanical failures so there is nothing much you can do. I tried changing controller card & didn't help. I would never buy a Seagate again.
I have two WD 256GB Caviar Black 7200rpm drives(RAID 1 configuration) on one of my computers, they run 8-12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week, never had a malfunction since the day I installed them 4 yrs ago. * I have noticed one thing though with platter style hard drives, if you over tighten the screws that bind them to your computer case slot, the platter(while its spinning) will tend to bounce around inside the hard drive casing which can and often does lead to premature failure.