From Tech Radar's recent article:
It's not just you - HDDs really are getting less reliable

last updated 5 May 2023

Now could be a great time to switch from HDD to SSDs

The balance of power between HDDs and SSDs could soon be about to shift for good, new figures have claimed.

Backblaze, which has been monitoring the failure rate of its hard drives over the course of a decade, has just announced its latest figures analyzing over 241,000 units.

Accounting for test drives and models with fewer than 60 in operation, Backblaze’s Q1 2023 report uncovered statistics from 236,893 drives, spanning 30 models from four manufacturers that account for almost 2.8 million TB of storage.

Are HDDs reliable?
According to its Q1 2023 figures, the hard drives used by Backblaze (some of which in operation for a number of years) are becoming less reliable, averaging an annualized failure rating of 1.54%, compared with 1.21% in the previous quarter.

This is a sharp increase on the 1.37% figure reported for 2022 as a whole, itself up from 1.01% in 2021 and 0.93% in 2020.

... It also marked Seagate as having the highest AFR of 2.28% compared with WDC on the opposite end of the scale, at 0.31%.

Age is another variable quoted by the company, with some of its drives not failing until their fifth year, and others in their first few months.

Don’t know yet. I have a hhd that I had in my first rig from 2010 and is still spinning away perfectly. I am thinking about a new build using M.2 NVMe SSD drives.

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Have switched everything over to M.2 NVMe or at least SATA SSDs for their main drives.
I do still use 6TB HDD for my large RAID array. Now I just need afordable 10TB+ SSD to exist and I will be all set.
Since the 7.5TB enterprise NVMe SSD are $1,500+ I am scared to look at the cost of the 15TB drives.

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