We found a fantastic article over at Ars Technica entitled "Putting hard drive reliability to the test shows not all disks are equal" which gives a fantastic overview of hard drive reliability by brand.

I'll be the first to admit, this breaks my heart. I've relied on Seagate drives for years now. I've purchased thousands of them and I still stand behind them as our top choice for archival grade long term storage. Apparently I'm going to need to switch to Hitachi. Thanks Obama.

Check out a blurb:

Hard drive manufacturers like to claim that their disks are extremely reliable. The main reliability measure used of hard disks is the mean time between failures (MTBF), and typically this is quoted as being somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million hours, or between 11 and 110 years.

These failures are generally assumed to follow a so-called bathtub curve, with relatively high failure rates when the drive is new—"infant mortality," caused by manufacturing defects—and similarly when the drive nears the end of its useful life, but low failure rates in between.

Data to actually support these beliefs, however, has always been a little scarce. Even when studies are published, the data within them is often anonymized. Backblaze's data names names and shows some big differences between the manufacturers.

Do you have a favorite hard drive brand? Mine WAS Seagate, and I think it still might be? I've never been let down by a Seagate hard drive, but apparently I've got a 30% higher chance of it happening if I don't switch.

Hitachi reps, please reach out with bulk discounts. Thank you.