As said above, there is a lot that can go wrong with a hard drive, both mechanically and electronically. However until solid state media can prove its longevity, hard drives are still our best option. Yet like cars, some drives are much more reliable than others. Here at MVI Data recovery we spend many hours every day, analysing and rebuilding drive failures, we have built up strong opinions on which are the best drives for reliability.

The root cause of system downtime or failure is due to hard disk drive failure, so you should be chosing the most reliable drives possible. Hard disk drive manufacturers calculate mean time to failure (MTTF) measurements for their products, but usually do not disclose such information.