in the past year or so, that's 1 or 2 500's, 2 250's, and 1 60gb.
wtf! I'm quickly copying my pictures on to a drive carina wasn't using yet.
I only have one copy now of all my pictures. and the drive that they are on is the same as the one that just died!

What make/model are rthey so I know what to avoid once I buy one?

I have 3 seagates and never had a problem. I allways hear shit about maxtor, but my 300gb has been good to me so far.

seeing as maxtor and seagate are the same company...

the 500 is a seagate, the 60 was a maxtor (that one was my fault), one of the 250's was a maxtor, and the other? a western digital.

that leaves you with what fujistu and hitachi?

I've had a hard time with hard-drives over the years. I've been thinking about just running everything in a Raid configuration, which doubles all your saved data onto two seperate drives at once. That way, when one dies the other has a perfect copy of all your data, and you simply need to throw a new drive in and copy it over.

Most hard drives have a 5 year warranty where they will replace a fried drive for free. Between a Raid configuration and free replacement drives, you'll never have to worry about data loss again.

the_reverend said:

So are Pioneer and Optimus. Problem is, one is crap, and the other is good. I've never, EVER had a maxtor drive that didn't fry after several months of intense use. At the same time, I've yet to have a single Seagate or Western Digital die on me. The WD, however, has given me a few other issues.

I backup all my data onto multple shit. I do this to the paranoid level. I've never had a failed drive yet though at home.

Our blessed mother of RAID5 has saved my ass at work a number of times on servers though.

i had 2 250 maxtors fail
a 120 maxtor (my fucking main system drive, good thing i don't keep anything on this)
and an 80 WD fail
I'm completely convinced maxtor has by far the largest failure rate. Most of my other WD drives from like 6 years ago are still chugging along.

I know someone that had 2 of his 300's in a RAID of 3 die.
I'm thinking of making two boxes with a couple 500GB HDs in them doing something funky. the problem is that I store my photos in HD form at home and at work. I also store DVDs at work, but I only backed up to 10/30/2005 there on DVD. I need to get more religious on it. I wish that I could just burn a 50GB BD every month.