The most fickle piece of equipment one has to buy in order to build a computer is the hard disk. I will relish the day when we can transition completely to solid state disks. Taking out moving parts will really increase the reliability of the personal computer by leaps and bounds. I just spent the weekend dealing with an unforeseen problem. I had two Western Digital Caviar Green series disks fail on me. One was a 750GB box, and the other was a one Terabyte box. Needless to say, I will never buy that particular series of disk again, and Western Digital has lost me as a loyal customer. I latched on to Western Digital after years of being a loyal Maxtor customer. I felt I needed to find a brand I could trust - and in this case, that trust was misplaced.

My sneaking suspicion is that hard drive manufacturers find it cheaper to leave the production line running, and sell a few palettes of bad disks when they find an error and then accept them back under RMA. This happened recently with AMD processors - except in that case that company was honest enough to be transparent about the problem - it was a series of early quad core cpus which had what was known as a "translation lookaside buffer" problem (or TLB bug).

My practice for buying parts for my computer is to use the Newegg store. This company has places for hobbyists and technicians to leave feedback and information for other customers to read about the quality of the goods which they purchased. This allows you to see where there might be a bad batch of stuff before you encounter the same problems other people have stumbled upon.

The thing I look for most is overall enthusiasm on the part of the customers who bought the product. When I was looking to buy a notebook computer, I chose the asus eeepc - because there was an entire fan website set up for really happy customers - and these people were very knowledgeable technically about the product.

The other thing I look for is: are there failures of the product, or drawbacks - and what are they? Know that you are buying something with the drawbacks which are listed by people. Don't hope that you can magically avoid those problems which they discover.

In the case of hard disks, it seems to me that every brand has a bad batch which they sell, occasionally. The key is to see are there any failures written about on the first couple pages of comments ; and if so... how does the disk fail? I can deal with a disk arriving and being completely unusable a lot easier than I can deal with a disk that fails after thirty days or six months. I can also deal more easily with a disk which fails slowly with write errors, than a disk which fails suddenly with that clicking sound which means a head has entirely broken off the apparatus.

For other equipment, I try to steer clear of what people call the "bleeding edge" (or what is commonly known as "the cutting edge"). My experience is that the newest most exciting technology is often immature, and I've seen a lot of things in this world sold to very wealthy customers which are really prototype kinds of equipment that doesn't work very well. The general rule with computer equipment is that things will come down in price dramatically when the production quantity goes up... and at that point, the manufacturing processes will be perfected. So I earnestly disagree with the popular idea that you "get a better product for a higher price."

And in general, there is a certain ethic of high quality workmanship which some companies have that others don't. This expresses itself in a thousand little usability details being taken care of. I just splurged and bought this mouse after having held it in my hand and pined after it at my local office depot store. The rubber grips, and the smooth mousewheel all scream at you the notion that it is high quality workmanship.