Read here; 

HDDs Typically Failed In Under 3 Years In Backblaze Study of 17,155 Failed Drives

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/hdds-typically-fail-in-under-3-years-backblaze-study-of-17155-drives-finds/ 

At the end of above is a link to Backblaze

The "Backblaze Full Hard Drive Test Data Set" is on its Hard Drive Test Data page,

where one can DL the data in pdf format as a zip file

 https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

I can not upload to AN as it is a 800 MB zip file.

 

Choose your HDDs carefully, do your backups please.

I suggest CMR drives only, don't use SMR drives for anything important, YMMV.

- howto

Interesting. But why do you think that SMR drives are problematic. Slow write speeds yes. Do you have data confirming this?

 

I had many hard drives in my life. Some seem to work forever and some fail already after a week. Therefore I have all data at least on 2 different disk and very important data in addition in an online cloud.

 

More than this. Since the disks are mirrored I simply switch to a backup disk if one of the main disk fails. Zero downtime. 

4 hours ago, howto said:

HDDs Typically Failed In Under 3 Years In Backblaze Study of 17,155 Failed Drives

Criminally misleading headline. The drives that failed, failed in under 3 years. The rest didn't fail. Overall the AFR was only 1.4 percent. So if your drive lasts longer than three years, as it almost certainly will, it's also probably going to last far longer. Yet any drive may fail whenever it d*mn well pleases, so be prepared for anything.

 

I think the thread can be filled with anecdotes about old drives still running.  

50 minutes ago, BigStar said:

I think the thread can be filled with anecdotes about old drives still running.

Thankfully, I still have some IDE drives that work.  I mounted one a few months ago and when checking it out I found the phone number for a friend I'd lost contact with for many years.  Even more amazing ... he still had that landline!