I hear you. I've got a couple of WD Black 640GB HDD's that I bought in 2008 that get used everyday as OS drives. The 640's made in the same plant as the 750's always had less of a failure rate than the 750's or the 500's. Now it seems the 1TB Blacks have settled down. (hopefully so since I now have 6 or 7 of them) Last time I checked the 2, 4 and 6TB's seemed iffy. M-Disc in the simulated/sped-up aging test only fared about 250 hours which translates somewhere close to their claimed lifespan (I guess) but the Syylex glass disc/disk averaged a 1000 hours in the same test. It makes the cost of M-Disc seem negligible. They can be read by most any DVD player but there isn't a publicly available burner anywhere, yet. That will probably change later. For now it's only done in house and is targeted at Commercial Archivers and Lottery Winners. It's all talk and predictions though until a good amount of time has elapsed. I build and fly Radio Control as a hobby and used Scorpion Brushless Motors, among others, and they were made in George the owners own shop in China by average workers but were held to a certain tolerance level and were subjected to a consistent level of Quality Control and you could count on their performance and dependability everytime. The Chinese have the capability to manufacture top notch quality merchandise as most any Country can that's not living in a cave and relying on a goat for their educational growth. All this cheap unreliable crap that we get to deal with is caused by Manufacturers not wanting to pay for Quality Control during the manufacturing process because it means a bigger bottom line for them. Between electrical charge leaking, cell degradation over time and worrying about the next solar system near miss throwing our magnetic poles off just enough so my trusty platter can't read or write anymore I may have to put my most valuable info in this whiskey bottle that I'm emptying. Damn goat. Rant over
What's it missing? That's what I get for not looking up at the screen often enough while performing my single-finger hunt and peckin typing routine.
Indeed, and...: The IT world as a whole thrives (profits) via ignorance as well as failure prone stuff of all sorts to sell, sell, sell. Too funny !!: When something apocalyptic goes down, the list of what becomes important for those who remain will likely exclude stored data for quite some time - and in point of fact, after toilet paper & coffee - I would be willing to accept that whiskey would be very much higher on that list than any sort of data handling...h/w, s/w or otherwise !! Thanks for your terrific (and amusing) reply !!!