Real world for me shows most drives are very reliable
When I first read this article "Vendor disk failure rates: Myth or metric" by Mary Brandel, it got me thinking about my own real world experience with drives. Personally, I've owned about 20 computers in my life. I've built dozens however, and some of the ones we have at work are 12 years old and they're "on" Monday through Friday for 8-10 hours per day to boot.
Of all the aforementioned computers, I've only had three drives fail. It seems to me that drives are more reliable than most people think. I suppose there are a number of factors that come into play here; is the drive in a laptop that gets banged around and how are the environmental conditions where the drives are operating? But for the normal office (or home) environment - where my drives operate - the facts speak for themselves. After nearly two decades of use I've experienced only three drive failures. Luck? Perhaps, but I'm not complaining!
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