Interesting to see the different perspectives. We have been doing tech support and repair since 1986. Since August of 1997, we have gone through 2743 hard drives installs, where we purchased new drives that were shipped though the roughest of UPS, FedEx, and USPS conditions.
Before 1997, we saw perhaps that many more with huge numbers of failures of Quantum, Fujica, Conner, Hitachi, IBM Deskstar, IBM Travel Star, and Maxtor drives... perhaps 900 or more.
But in the past 10 years, we had failures of 11 Western Digital 60 & 80 GB desktop drivesl, 4 Western Digital laptop drives, 7 Hitachi TravelStar, 113 Maxtor drives, 1 Seagate Desktop drive, 3 Seagate laptop drives, and 1 Toshiba laptop drive failure. Except for the high failures of the Maxtor, that failure percentage is very low.
I think your buddy's report of 10 percent failures is full of baloney. Subtracting out that 113 Maxtors, which put them out of business, the failure rates we see have been less than one percent... not bad when part of those failures were due to stupidity, anger, abuse, and the UPS driver.
It is just extremely rare to have a hard drive fail, unless it suffered hard impact during shipment... We track all component failures of our regular clients and corporate contacts.... Only DVD and CD optical drives, eMachines, and Sony VAIOS have unreasonable failure rates.
The fact that Seagate is now comfortable in giving a five year warranty, and Samsung soon will do so, is a good indicator