Yeah, its hard to spot some patterns. Although IBM did one on everyone years back with their maximally expanding glass platters lol. Caused them to sell off the division to Hitachi, which made me wary of Hitachi for a while.

Last I checked Hitachi still had the highest failure rates... they're just about the only HDD manufacturer I currently avoid.

lol, follows Yasamokas comment. The next Hitachi (read IBM :P) drive I bought after that was the 1TB drive that is now 5 years old and still running perfectly with 30,735hrs use. The Samsung that failed was not much over 2 years old, run in the same environment. The other 1TB Samsung I am running has re-allocated sector count flagged up, but has been fine with this error for 1.5 years. This has clocked up 31,815 hrs !

WD RED line of drives are the worst I have ever used. The seagates seem to hold up well. As long as you buy the better model. But I expect that. You dont buy WD blue or green line expecting them to last a while.