Customer Feedback makes all hardware purchases seem like a crapshoot [For anyone]

I work as part of a two-man IT staff for a small technical school and my job is building all of our custom servers. However, I've run into a fairly large problem in the last couple of years when I can't find recommendations for what parts to buy: Whenever I think I've found a good component that fits my needs perfectly, it invariably has at least a dozen customer reviews that say it failed spectacularly in their rig, sometimes several dozen. This ranges from water coolers that have pipes burst and spray coolant all over the case, to power supplies that catch fire and fry the rest of the components, to motherboards that don't support the features claimed on the box. And these reviews are completely separate from the idiots who give a part a bad review because they don't understand or misread a specification or something, these are legitimate bad reviews that come with literally every part I try to find.

Is it really just a crapshoot to buy parts? Or is something else at work here, such as the people with failed hardware being more likely to give a review vs someone who buys the part and it works so perfectly they forget about it? I'm really at a loss to explain this.

I usually dont leave a review unless I'm dissatisfied. 

So yes, that is a big factor. People love to complain.

Also, there will always be defective parts. In anything that you buy.

I have been trying to give good reviews for things i bought online to tell people how great of a product it is! but yes people tend to write reviews if they dislike something or it didn't work...

 

The other factor is some people just don't know how to handle or install or troubleshoot pc parts properly and my assumption is that 60+% of the stated rmas in reviews are because of user error due to the fact that I have built and been around 1000s of pcs and rma ed 1 motherboard ever due to damage. I have never received a bad Hard Drive personally when I worked for Readers Digest we had maybe 20 8'x8'x3' Canvas dollys filled with working hard drives and a small palate maybe 12 inches in height of dead ones. Got special access to their underground data center with robotic giant drive silos with one guy controlling the room on a rail chair system in flipflops and a Def Leopard T-shirt. My boss said he was so expensive that in his contract they stated he was not aloud to talk to people casually. Was one of my favorite experiences :) I always try to stay away from stuff till rev. B even though I love new tech it tends to be less stable at first release. I know Wendell mentioned having trouble with 4tb drives recently so my luck may be running out lol.

My wife is in Hospitality Management and you basically have to pay people to write good reviews its the nature of humans I guess to complain more than praise. I try to reverse it as much as possible.

Dissatisfied customers alway have the loudest voices. I work in retail and very rarely do we get compliments even though we do things right all of the time. But we get 20 complaints for every one thing we do wrong. Human nature I suppose. One thing to take from this is to remember to give feedback as much as possible. Then the reviews will get diluted better with positives.

I find that customer reviews tend to have a very limited value. Tech forums seem to be the best place to find real info on products and their use. Personally , i ask questions in as many different techs forums i can find. It gives me a far better purchase success. :) Mind you, even that comes with bias and good products do get overlooked. So somethings always seem like a crap shoot but unless your purchasing cutting edge tech it should not be. Research from as many different sources as possible.