One of the most important decisions to make when purchasing is "how relaible are the components I buy?"
In general, the answer is "very". For most components and devices - automobiles, motherboards, televisions, whatever, modern manufacturing is usually fairly reliable. Once in a blue moon a quality problem slips though (Pentium 4, anyone? or the fiasco with Nvidiamobile graphics cards a few years back).
But small numbers make things very difficult. Is a failure rate of 2.5% acceptable? Maybe, but if you know that a competitive manufacturer has a failure rate of .5%, then the decision changes. In both cases the majority of purchasers will never have a problem. But if the manufacturer sells 1,000,000 units of each, then one product will have 25,000 failures and the other will have "only" 5,000 unhappy customers - that's a big deal.
It is really not easy to accurately determine the failure rate of PC components. The best job is done by the French site, hardware.fr (http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-1/taux-retour-composants-9.html). They monitor some large French electronics retailers for product returns. The problem? Well, the site is in French, for starters.
Google Translate is a great help and here is a screen grab of one section - the return rate of SSDs
(http://knucklecracker.com/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=14691.0;attach=16208;image) (http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html)
Now tell me: Would you buy an OCZ or Crucual SSD? How much cheaper would they have to be than a Samsung SSD before you'll take the gamble that yours won't fail?
Cloud storage firm Backblaze reported results of a study that found that consumer hard drives are as reliable as enterprise hard drives - for the first 3 years.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/385792/consumer-hard-drives-as-reliable-as-enterprise-hardware
Here's the original source artice in the Backblaze blog: http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/
ExtremeTech has another article featuring BackBlaze's research.
BackBlaze is an online backup company and has around 28,000 hard drives spinning 24/7.
The ExtremeTech article is in the image links. The full BackBlaze article breaks it down by specific model (http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/)s.
(http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hard-drive-annual-failure-rate-hitachi-seagate-wd.jpg) (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives)(http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hard-drive-survival-rate-in-months-hitachi-seagate-wd.jpg) (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives)
I know Helper might not agree, based on his experience. It also makes me a little apprehensive, because based on the much higher review rating on Newegg, I just ordered my first 4TB Seagate NAS drive. I should have gone with Hitachi... :)
Note: Regardless of what you buy, you still have a (very small) chance that your drive will fail earlier than the statistical average.
I remember a Seagate I bought (first SATA drive actually), and at the time I ordered it, lots of reviews on Newegg were good, putting the avg about 4 to 4.5 (maybe higher), then for whatever reason, when I looked a year later, the reviews were mostly "Drive dies after a year". Enough to knock the rating below 3. I quickly stopped using that drive for my OS soon after that (and getting too annoyed at my RAID breaking so often because the drives I have now seem RAID hostile). OS drive double in space as a result however :P