I have only seen three hard drives die on me: An IBM, a Samsung, and a Fujitsu -- all laptop drives and all in Dell latops (the first two in my girl friend's old Inspiron 2500, and the last in my Inspiron 6400).
My guess is excessive load/unload cycles as the 2500 was constantly hitting the swap file, and I could never seem to stop the constant load/unload on my 6400.
I tend to buy mainly Seagates, though have purchased some WDs as well. There are a few Maxtors too (pre-built machines).
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I lied, I had a dead Seagate once. It was DOA though. A part of the casing (1/8" aluminum I think) was bent, indicating a pretty good drop.
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