Hard drive madness

I've always burned through hard drives fairly regularly. Like one or two per year.

This isn't only because they aren't made well (they definitely are not) but also because I have several on the go most of the time.

The current line-up in my main computer is:

Make	Capacity	Age	Notes
Seagate	320 GB	2.5 years	The two SATA Seagate drives are in a RAID-1* configuration. One has already died and been RMA'd** so hooray for RAID!
Seagate	320 GB	1.5 years
Maxtor	160 GB	4 years	An IDE drive that is the result of an RMA'd 80GB drive that was the result of an RMA'd 40GB drive. I wouldn't say Maxtor is the hardiest of brands... and living in fear of losing data is hardly worth the free upgrades.
Fujitsu	13 GB	9 years!!	A tiny old IDE drive that just hasn't died yet.

*RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. RAID-1 is a mirror setup so that all drives are written to identically but are treated as a single drive. So my 2x320GB drives are seen as a single 320GB rather than 640GB -- hence the redundancy.
**RMA = Return Merchandise Authorization: when an item dies and the manufacturer replaces it for free. When it comes to my hard drives, once one dies they generally have to upgrade me since they no longer make the size in question.

And in my other computer:

Make	Capacity	Age	Notes
Western Digital	120 GB	4.5 years	IDE drive currently hosting Slackware Linux 12.1, as well as DOS 6.22 with Windows 1, 2, 3 and 3.11.
Maxtor	60 GB	7 years	AAAARGGHH!!! It's in the processing of dying. It's an NTFS drive used in part by Linux, and it's unable to mount properly every other time. And it's making all the wrong noises.

So six drives working okay (though I'm hearing other occasional clicks) and one about to die. And we won't even talk about all the other ones buried behind the shed over the years.