Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > No wonder Backblaze has replaced most of their inventory with these two brands. We Reed-Solomon encode each file across mul

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > No wonder Backblaze has replaced most of their inventory with these two brands. We Reed-Solomon encode each file across multiple drives in multiple machines, and we always use "enough parity" that the failure rate won't result in data loss. So for us, we have a (pretty simple) little spreadsheet that takes into account drive failure rate as a cost, along with drive density (more dense drives means renting less data center space) and we let the spreadsheet kick out which drives to buy based on the cheapest total cost of ownership. Honestly, we're not brand loyal AT ALL, and we're not afraid of a higher failure rate (other than that raises the cost because we have to buy replacements for failed drives). With that said, if an individual purchases ONE DRIVE they might value a lower drive failure rate differently than Backblaze does. But honestly, if there is a 1% drive failure rate per year or a 10% drive failure rate in a year, you should still backup the data so you can sleep at night.