I used to work at a large community college where I supported several hundred Gateway 2000 machines, both in labs and as instructor workstations. They all used WD drives. I replaced a hard drive about once every 2-3 weeks (not to mention the other crap hardware Gateway uses).
I will never own a Gateway 2K computer or another WD drive. Others may have different experience, but my unique background formed *my* unique opinion. :)
--Danny
I'm not hardware reliability expert, but with "several hundred" machines only one every 2-3 weeks sounds pretty reliable to me. ie. MTBF = 5 years for a good disk drive = 5 * 52 wks = 260 wks (MTBF per drive) You had "several hundred" machines, so the projected failure rate should have been closer to one per week. Greg