Hard disk stability vs. size

Lately, I've been throwing around the idea of getting a bigger slave drive for my system and I've started to look at hard drives, but I remembered something I read or heard somewhere:

"Larger hard drives tend to crash more than smaller ones."

Now, I've searched around Google and Ask.com and I haven't found anything relating the two....so, is this true or am I remembering something that I never heard in the first place?

Thanks!

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I call bullshit. The only Hard Drives I've ever had die were 6-10GB Western Digitals. I've used a wide array of hard drives from 340MB to 320GB for extended periods of time (and had a brief experience with a 400GB SATA disc) and never seen any such correlation.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Well, new hard drives nowadays come with a 3 or 5 year manufacturer's warranty. If they didn't think the hard drive would last that long, they certainly wouldn't warranty it for that amount of time.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

This is news to me. Perhaps you are confusing it with something else. Years back, there were issues with 10K RPM SCSI hard-drives and weren't as reliable as the 7200's. However, like Render said, vendors are more confident that their products will last and are putting 5 year warranties on them.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Technically a drive with a larger capacity has a greater possibility for a defect, but since all drives are tested before they are shipped, this is a moot point. Most drives I have used are perfectly reliable, with the exception of an infamous IBM unit, and a couple of Seagates that most probably began to fail due to excessive heat. This had nothing to do with the capacity though; one was an 80GB and the other Seagate was 300GB.

Just keep it cool and keep a backup, and you'll be fine.

I was speaking idiomatically.

More capacity -> more platters, more heads, larger motor -> more components that can fail.

In general higher density recording technology also leads to a more complex mechanical system. And we all know that the possibility that something breaks in a complex system is much higher than in a simple system.

On the other side technologies like automatic sector relocation, SMART, shock protection, etc. compensate these negative effects.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I do not think there's something to be afraid of. Size/Stability Rate is very high thank's to today's HDD ingeneering. Seagate HDDs do have Life-time warranty.

FELIPE NO