OK, I know this question has little to do with Linux per se, but please help if you could.

Over the past several years, I've suffered many Seagate Barracuda drives going bad on me. Average crash time has been around one year.

I just want to know what Server-class drives people are using out there that is reliable?

The machines I use the drives in are Web servers, so they are busy. My preliminary research shows "Western Digital Caviar RE2" to be promising.

Thank you.

Interesting. We've been using Seagate Cheetah UltraSCSI 10Krpm drives in our Sun E250 servers for years. We have maybe something like 40 drives among several servers, and we've only experienced maybe 3 drive failures in 5 years. We don't have server class rooms, so they aren't as cool as we might like. But they are on APC SmartUPS. They run all the time, and are never shut down except for maintenance. They handle mail, web, file sharing, printing, database, calendars, gene sequencing, etc. etc. for several hundred full time staff.

What kind of servers and environment do you have?

My drives are SATA 7200rpm. Maybe SATA's are not as reliable as SCSI's.

My next build will be with 10Krpm drives. Maybe I'll fare better that way.

Thanks for your response.

Consumer grade SATA drives will not hold up to commercial use. Western Digital has a line of commercial SATA drives that might last five years. As said before, Seagate Cheetah are industrial drives, and they're made to be used continuously, for years.