75% failure rate on 24" iMac hard drives?
I'm no Mac newbie. I've had about 15 different Macs since '88 and only once have I had a hard drive fail on me, and that was a Mac Quadra 700 with a twitchy Seagate drive from the time Apple was lost in the wilderness. And yet now I have I have 3 out of 4 of the same form factor poop out on me in as little as 3 years? Something is rotten in Denmark.
This is not a rant against Apple, OS X or Macs in general. I love my Macs. What I want to know is this: is this a design flaw with this form factor or were the Western Digital drives they came with just crappy to begin with? I've used stand-alone WD drives for Time Machine installations, and yes, I've discovered that those are crap. Of the 4 I bought, 2 of them failed within the 1st year, so I'm leaning toward the WD theory. But if its a design flaw, such as the HD (regardless of the manufacturer) isn't being properly cooled due to to the design, I would like to know that. I need to know that. If I didn't have Applecare, I certainly would like to know if I had to factor in $350 every year for a new HD replacement.
So what I would like to find out is if anyone else out there has been having a similar experience with the 24" iMacs. Did you need to have your HD replaced as well? Did they replace it with a WD drive or a non-WD drive, like a Hitachi? How did that go? Has anyone had failures with the Hitachi drives? I'm really curious to see how prevalent this has been.
24 in. Imac, Mac OS X (10.6.3)