Backblaze [affiliate link] (which as most of you know is my preferred cloud backup system, where to-date I have about 8TB across multiple Macs backed up to) publishes regular hard drive reliability stats. Given that they are a massive data center who happens to keep very good records, they're a pretty good source for this sort of thing! This quarter they are reporting on 42,749 hard drives in use. That's… kind of a lot!

What they don't do is call out what drive is best or worst. They simply provide the raw data. If you want to know the average reliability from drives you currently own, or are considering buying, or are looking to replace or upgrade drives you currently have, this can be a great resource.

There are a few things to look at…

• Hard Drive Reliability Stats for Q1 2015 — The current report.
• Hard Drive Data Sets — Where you can download the raw data. All 12 million rows of it for 2014 alone.
• Storage Pod 4.5 – Tweaking a Proven Design — Just in case you want to build your own massive storage solution!

Here's my main system setup. Pretty impressive. 

Over 6TB on this Mac alone backed up to Backblaze… wow

As always, I can't recommend these guys enough. Great system, great support, set-it-and-forget-it backup. It may take months or even years to do your initial backup if it's huge, but better to start today than tomorrow.