WHS - Hard Drives and Large Capacity Failures?

My WHS has been humming along great for a couple months now. I have started to look at higher capacity drives. I currently have 5 x 1TB drives. I don't need the capacity yet, but if I can find a really great deal I'll buy one or two 1.5TB or 2TB as they go on sale, like I did with my 1TB ones.

The problem I've seen from customer reviews on these higher capacity drives so far are drive failure, flat out. Either they work or they fail with in a few months. Has anyone had this issue, and what the the heck would cause these drives to fail? It seems hard drives are one of the most tried and true technologies out there.

Could it be that you should do a full format before you use them to ensure bad sectors are eliminated, and then why are there bad sectors on a new drive? Is it better to go retail over OEM then? Maybe that's the concern?

I guess I don't expect anyone to know for sure, but it makes me uneasy to buy a higher capacity drive when it has a decent risk for failure.

 

The higher the disk capacity, I suppose the more likely a drive to fall out of tolerance. Other than that, I don't know what could cause general failures other than a decline in quality assurance.

I absolutely positive whole-heartedly believe that companies would never cut down on quality in order to save a few bucks .

 

It's just disconcerting. Most of the 1TB drives seem very reliable with very little complaint of failure, yet the 1.5TB or 2TB ones have a large % stating failure. Perhaps manufacturing processes are not as capable for these higher areal densities yet.

I guess I'll just have to wait it out until it seems their failure rate improves, as long as I don't need more capacity before then. I only have five available drive slots, really four, but modded it for a fifth.