The Intel 285K CPU in my high-end 2025 Linux PC died again! 😡 Notably, this was the replacement CPU for the original 285K that died in March, and after reading through the reviews of Intel CPUs on my electronics store of choice, many of which (!) mention CPU replacements, I am getting the impression that Intel’s current CPUs just are not stable 😞. Therefore, I am giving up on Intel for the coming years and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D CPU instead.
I was in team AMD in the 2000s for two reasons: price and competition to Intel. Intel had a massive anti-trust loss to AMD around that time, and I wanted AMD to succeed. I stuck with them until Zen was actually competitive and stayed with them ever since because they actually had better products. Intel was the king in both performance and power efficiency until that Zen release, so I really don’t know where that advice would’ve come from.
As for Hitachi and Western Digital, WTF? Hitachi hasn’t been a thing for well over a decade since they sold their HDD business to WD, and WD is generally as reliable or better than its competition. It sounds like you were impacted by a couple failures (probably older drives?) and made a decision based on that. If you look at Backblaze stats, there’s not a huge difference between manufacturers, just a few models that do way worse than the rest.