Shit, sorry.
>>18
Going on memory:
We were using Seagate U160 Cheetahs for servers and WD for all WS builds for several years when a local sourcer was giving us good volume deals on both. Those 15 WDs included 2 DOA drives (Raptors) and 2 short-term failures (Raptor #3 and something from a few years ago), plus a lot of old ones in the 2-10 GB range from ancient builds. Total of no less than 100. The rest still work, but most have been retired due to age. This only means that old WDs don't hold up, but still, much worse than our track record with Seagate.
The ~10 Maxtors were out of around 60 or 70 drives, from a combination of white-boxes/pre-builts and a handful of drives we bought cheap at retail (rebates) for pinch projects. Of course that practice stopped real fast. Some of the rest are still in service, including a few 30-60 GB drives we bought in 2001, but they are replaced once bearing noise starts kicking in.
The Seagate deaths were all very old ATA drives and 1 RMA on a 18 GB Cheetah. Every other Seagate that is no longer in service was retired for age (at the time, outgrowing our expensive U160 arrays in favor of larger SATA-150 drives), not because of wear and tear. This is out of about 100 drives (not including the Barracudas we have deployed currently), many of which were admittedly SCSI drives that were never going to fail.
I'd say less than 50 DeathStars (all IBM, Poland) and less than 10-20 units each of any other manufacturer. We never actively bought these other brands; they would usually come with the pre-builts we ordered or received as donations. A note about the IBMs we had: they ran hotter than any other drive at the same speed, and they were noisy as hell, if not due to head failure, then due to the loudest fucking bearing noise that seemingly got worse on a monthly basis. About three years ago we replaced and wiped every single IBM drive regardless of current age / noise level. I should take them home and give them to people I hate.
The Fujitsu failures are 2.5 GB and 3.2 GB drives that I don't know the story about but are just in an old dead drive pyramid one of our guys keeps. The other 10 or so ran fine until we pulled them a long time ago (former W98 installs that were upgraded W95 installs). I didn't install them, and I didn't care about their reputation, but I remember the surviving ones didn't seem to have any problems.
Spinpoint Ts we started using frankly because I and a few of the other IS guys had started buying Samsungs for our home machines, and we ended up loving them for the speed, low temps, low noise, and low price. Director said cool, did his own research, and now they are the only SATA drives we use on new workstations. I guess I shouldn't really care if people don't use them, but I'll use them for as long as they work this well, especially at the price. Then again, we've never encountered a bad one yet out of maybe 30 builds so far, so I can't tell you how bad a bad Spinpoint can be. Quality control seems a lot better than on our old Samsungs. And it's not that Seagates are BAD in comparison, I like them, but these drives continue to keep us happy and we still consider them the new hotness around here.