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For one thing, these drives aren't retail drives, and aren't covered by the retail warranty. Which is unexpected when you bought it in a retail environment. OEM drive warranty starts when originally sold, not whenever you purchased it, labeled as new.

For another, drive warranties don't cover data extraction or downtime, and while pushing the drive 4 years ahead on the bathtub curve is possibly nice for avoiding early failures, it also means you're more likely to suffer from old age failures. It might not even help that much on avoiding early failures, because shipment probably brings its own set of possible failures.

I'm only aware of one open data set of drive failures, from Backblaze, but it shows the bathtub curve pretty well, after a small number of early failures, most drive models settle down for quite some time, and then start to trend up in failures again.

I'd like my 5 years of warrantied use to be the first 5 years of the drive's lifetime. If it doesn't fail in the first couple months, there's a pretty good chance it won't fail during the warranty period, regardless of brand; even if some brands do have a meaningfully higher failure rate than others.



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