ytswy - 11:26 am on Jan 30, 2008 (gmt 0)

A large computer component retailer site I buy a lot from has user reviews and I've noticed that it doesn't work well at all for some products, such as hard drives.

There's so many different models, which get replaced on a fairly frequent schedule, that most individual products just attract a couple of "bought this and it failed after 3 weeks, useless product do not buy 0/5" type reviews.

Which doesn't tell anyone anything apart from the fact that hard drives have a failure rate. Without knowing how many people bought this product and didn't have problems the reviews don't give any useful information.

The way it works out is that the better drives tend to have the most bad reviews, I presume because more people buy them, and therefore the total number of failures is greater.