How does make and model stack up with the rates you are seeing?

I can't imagine that the interface affects failure rate though. There is probably some other variable at work.

SCSI drives were always rock solid. 😀

IDE drives got cheaper during that whole 120gb-250gb time period. Of the handful I have, I think about 20% have had issues as well, so it seems like par for the course.

SATA came after what seemed like the problem times of IDE was over (500gb+), so the hardware technology was a lot more robust I guess.

I bet you can create a whole bunch of retro gaming machines and sell them off one by one. 😉

Every non-scsi drive I've brought up to 10,000' altitude starts to loose sectors within months. I've lost 5, 4 IDE. My last sata 1T seagate held on for a few years simply due to size and my monitoring and exceeded spares in August. The replacement is in and I did not spin or prep it until it was up here and sat for awhile. The OS is on SSD and so far so good. My scsi record is 2 failed out of 30 or so, and maybe 5 reported some grown sectors. Most were in arrays.

Hard drives definitely have mechanical problems at very high altitudes.

^ Yep, the thin air at altitude is bad medicine for HDD floating heads.

FIrst generation SATA drives were actually PATA with an integrated adapter for the most part. I recall high failure rates when drives passed the 80GB mark, but improved after reaching around 250GB a few years later (2003-05). I have encountered quite a few SATA drive failures, mostly 2nd generation Western Digital Blue units in the 250-320GB size over the years.