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Western Digital has the Most Reliable High Capacity HDDs with a Failure Rate of Under 0.35%
(www.hardwaretimes.com)
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
Not sure that the failure rate is all that important anymore because in the first instance most people are running SSD's as their primary drive and secondly who stores bulk data on solitary hard drives?
With easy to use filesystems like ZFS, I store data using Raid-Z (raid 5) or Raid-Z2 (raid 6) which is a bit more expensive, but it means a single hard disk failure is no longer a case of catastrophic data loss.
If you're going to be running a Raid-Z/Z2 stripe in your NAS and you're given a choice of buying hard drives with a 2% AFR or alternatively a different bunch of drives that have a 1% AFR but cost say 10%-20% more then which do you choose? Since you no longer have data loss with a single drive failure so then it's just an economic decision of which is the greater cost of either dealing with extra RMA's vs paying more upfront.