Only computer hardware Ive personally had fail were two buffalo link stations. First one lasted about 8 months and they replaced it with a newer and bigger one that lasted about 4 months. I just tossed it into the trash at that point. I had a fan fail on an old G-Force card but never found out till went to upgrade it. That's all my personal experiences.

However working for Dell the last 7 years of my life, it doesn't matter what vendor it is, they will fail. About once or twice a year a manufactuer will put out just a crap run of equipment from hard drives, to motherboards, to optical drives. Some can be fixed with firmware up dates, but few and far between do people do that before the problem occurs. Other times the fail rates are so high the stock has to be simply purged. Where that purged stock goes is anyones guess, but you get what you pay for on thoes discount web sites.

So eventualy your golden, can do no wrong, favorite brand will go to crap. And the brand you swore you would never buy will be the only company thats making what you want that works. Keyclone, if you think your seeing a trend then you prolly are and it will be gone by the next run of equipment. But god knows how long it will take for bad stock to get out of the enviroment.