This discussion and the prices I encountered have scared me off for now. I've joined the wait and watch club regarding SSDs. Today, I ordered a replacement hard drive, but this time I ordered the version with a 5 year warranty (instead of the 3 year warranty version that failed) that is glowingly described as follows:
1.0TB Seagate Barracuda ES-2 Enterprise-Class SATA II 7200RPM 32MB Buffer Hard Drive W/ Perpendicular Drive Technology. New w/5 Year Seagate Warranty!
Thanks for the help in making a decision. One little twist worth mentioning is that I told the vendor of the failed drive, OWC, that the drive contained confidential and proprietary information of clients that I absolutely must protect. I told them I would personally mutilate the drive and send them the mutilated drive if they wanted it. They told me that there would be no warranty replacement unless I sent in the failed drive unscathed. I told them that my license to practice law would be in jeopardy if I did such a thing and that I would keep the drive and mutilate it. The safety of my clients' data was worth more to me than the price of a new drive. So, no replacement unless you're willing to trust them and Seagate to which they would ship the failed drive. The moral to the story is that there is no such thing as a warranty replacement if you're not willing to trust them with your data on a failed drive. I found that disillusioning, but I do see their point. They want to actually see that it failed and they also want to see why it failed.
In the past, I've always bought the "server quality" version of hard drives rather than the economy model and I've never had a hardware failure of a hard drive. My first venture into the lower-priced version bit me within 2 months of installation.
Thanks again for the very helpful discussion.
