Backblaze, a cloud storage company, periodically reveals it's own experience with hard drives, which probably represents the largest real world report (over 56,000 drives). Their mix represents large capacity 3.5" drives that get run 24/7. Their experience still finds that HGST (Hitachi)/Toshiba drives (all now owned by WD) mostly 2 Gb drives have been the most reliable, many now over 5 years old. Seagate 3 Tb drives of the last few years were pretty much a disaster and they have pulled those that did not fail. They are having better experience with recent 4 Tb Seagates as HGST/Toshiba has stopped making a model at that size with the price/performance they preferred. The high failure rate in the graph of WD models seems to reflect much older models.
While WD owns HGST/Toshiba, they are still made in separate factories and reflect different technologies as the purchase agreement requires WD to keep the factories/technologies distinct for roughly another 18 months as I recall.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-most-reliable-hard-drives-in-2015-according-to-backblaze/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61
The factory boxed versions of these drives, often on sale, in the 2 to 3 Tb sizes are often on sale at Newegg and represent your best bang for the buck with the best reliability. There is a distinct drop-off in the reliability of the bulk/oem versions of these same drives which I ascribe to Newegg's shamefully lousy packing/shipping of the bulk drives (one layer of bubble wrap and throw it in a too big box with inadequate filling so it can bounce around on it's way to you). Buy the boxed versions.
While WD owns HGST/Toshiba, they are still made in separate factories and reflect different technologies as the purchase agreement requires WD to keep the factories/technologies distinct for roughly another 18 months as I recall.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-most-reliable-hard-drives-in-2015-according-to-backblaze/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61
The factory boxed versions of these drives, often on sale, in the 2 to 3 Tb sizes are often on sale at Newegg and represent your best bang for the buck with the best reliability. There is a distinct drop-off in the reliability of the bulk/oem versions of these same drives which I ascribe to Newegg's shamefully lousy packing/shipping of the bulk drives (one layer of bubble wrap and throw it in a too big box with inadequate filling so it can bounce around on it's way to you). Buy the boxed versions.
