Originally Posted by staffsMike 
Don't seem to hear about may AAKS drives failing. Currently I've got 5 in various builds and a few others (AAJS as well as older ones) still in use. Not tried RMA with western digital but touch wood I won't need to
I've had a WD failure recently. 4 year old 80GB drive failed in a Dell that I'd been asked to diagnose. But then, that's one drive out of about 15 over the past 7 years, about 11 of which have been in constant use until last week. Other than that 1 dead one (well, it's got some bad sectors), they're all fine.
Personally, I'm only buying WD recently. Tried 2 Seagate 7200.10s and they're both dead and then a Samsung (the equivalent WD was out of stock at Scan) and it's only picked up on the JMicron controller of my P5B - the Intel one doesn't recognise it at all in RAID mode, and the other 3 disks on it are fine. I'd imagine if it was set to ACHI or IDE emulation mode it would be picked up fine, but meh. I wasn't overly impressed.