I have quantum fireball from 2000, so 26 years old, still going strong.

5 years doesn't seem that long for a drive that cost hundreds of dollars! Persistence is the point.

Just wondering why Seagate seems like the bottom of the barrel in the longevity department. Western Digital drives seem to fail a lot less frequently on average in this dataset and in my life experience.

To Seagate's credit, I do have 8x24TB drives that have been working fine for the past 4 years. Hopefully can last a few more until the compute hardware shortages pass.

That's a brand I haven't heard of in a long time. I had a 8gb HDD from the brand in 2000 until my sister kicked the computer case out of frustration which ended up shorting some chips on the drive. I mourned the loss of my music collection for quite a long time.

Well, I have a 200mb maxtor IDE works just fine to this day.

The classic Deathstars™ ["Deskstar"]

I used a 1.2gb Fireball for my main drive around that era — it is so comically loud!.

Only expected if its Seagate. Backblaze Hitachi drives had miniscule failure rates thru their whole life cycle.