A query from Bobbie Pastor opened the conversation. Ward Stanke advises, "Drives die. Western Digital is generally better than Seagate, Toshiba seems to be better than WD.
"Here's a blog post from Backblaze that talks about their experiences with consumer grade hard drives (like you or I would buy from Costco or Best Buy)."
And Ward concludes with, "Backblaze runs a profitable cloud storage service using theses drives and has accumulated quite a bit of data concerning reliability, primarily on Seagate, WD and some on Toshiba."