>>15
Swallow a cock and twirl in place. 20 years - ha, yeah, I had a PC when I was 10 too, old man. You've impressed only yourself with that one. Today's Samsung is not the Samsung of five years ago, no less 10 or 15 years ago, in ANY of their product lines. I say this both as someone with two SpinPoint Ts at home and also as someone with a fucking c.1999 4.3 GB Samsung which, while slow as shit, is still spinning fine in a build only recently pulled out of service. Whereas Samsung used to be a joke, SpinPoint T is the whole damn show now.
Anyway, since isolated anecdotes are useless, here are mine to go with yours:
From what I can remember of the past 9 years of workstation builds and repairs for 200-300 heads, we have had at least about 5 (mostly old) Seagates, 15 WDs (including 3 Raptors we bought for ourselves in IS), 10 Maxtors, 5 old Samsungs, 2 old Fujitsus, 5 IBMs (all from the Poland factory I believe), and 0 Hitachis (we never purchased any) die on us, along with many old no-names that shipped along with OEM PCs. All new builds since FY07 started have been either Barracudas for ATA-100 or SpinPoint Ts for SATA. No RMAs yet, and no calls yet have been attributable to disk failure. And guess what - the Spinpoints really are quieter.
As for your guaranteed caps on lifespan, I have drives that are swapped in and out every few months from all of the above manufacturers (plus a handful of Conners and Quantums from before my time here) that still work. Our oldest Conner is from 1991 and still has a functional Netware install on it.
>>16
Hitachi, now. Supposedly they still run hot like IBMs always did. As bad or worse than Maxtor - they always developed clicking heads faster than anyone else.