Are the Newegg hard drive ratings accurate indicators of drive failure rates?
I personally do not believe so. Generally hard drive manufacturers sell drives to major OEMs at a discount in exchange for greatly reduced warranty coverage from the manufacturer. For example if one were to purchase a Hewlett-Packard computer with a Western Digital hard drive (just an example) and that drive were to fail, the consumer would generally ask HP for a replacement rather than Western Digital. To protect themselves, the major OEMs have contracts that specify a maximum annual failure rate or another reliability metric. This is a very common practice in the industry and is not exclusive to hard drive manufacturers. The reliability metrics are usually tied to some sort of financial recourse, often a penalty, if components fail at a higher rate. Generally these reliability metrics require manufacturers to produce drives with approximately 96% +/-3% 90 day failure rate. Terms of course vary quite a bit, especially between large tier-1 manufacturers and tier-2 manufacturers but it
