This paper is mainly dedicated to a short-time scale reliability study of different packages applied to the same type of laser diode bars: indium and gold-tin packaged laser bars are operated in cw hard-pulse mode with increasing currents until their destruction. The destruction currents serve as guide values for long-time aging tests that should be performed at lower currents. Gold-tin packaged diode lasers turn out to have clearly higher destruction currents in hard-pulse mode. This result is underlined by long-time aging tests at appropriate currents.