Are linux-fs's drive-fault-tolerant by concept?

[Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com>]

Hello all,

after shooting down one of this bloody cute new very-big-and-poor IDE drives
today I wonder whether it would be a good idea to give the linux-fs (namely my
preferred reiser and ext2 :-) some fault-tolerance. I remember there have been
some discussions along this issue some time ago and I guess remembering that it
was decided against because it should be the drivers issue to give the fs a
clean space to live, right? 
Unfortunately todays' reality seems to have gotten a lot worse comparing to one
year ago. I cannot remember a lot of failed drives back then, but today about
20% seemed to be already shipped DOA. Most I came across have only small
problems (few dead sectors), but they seemed to produce quite a lot of trouble 
- at least on my 3ware in non-RAID setup the box partly dies away because
reiser feels quite unhappy about the non-recoverable disk-errors.
I know this question can get religious, but to name my only point: wouldn't it
be a good defensive programming style _not_ to rely on proven-to-be-unreliable
hardware manufacturers. Thing is: you cannot prevent buying bad hardware these
days, because just about every manufacturer already sold bad apples ...

Regards,
Stephan