GOOGLE published some HDD failure data

[Zak33]

Google have got through a few hard drives in their time...

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

prollly a bit out of date for you uber tech heads....but worthy of a link.

[Funkstar]

I read about this when it was first published, thanks for the link i'll bookmark it i think.

They don't go into manufacters, but more environmental and usage paterns.

They conclude that temperature doesn' have as much of an effect on reliability as you would think. Whish is interesting from a quiet computing point of view.