Google, which uses hundreds of thousands of off-the-shelf consumer grade hard drives in its storage facilities, has released the results of a long term study of the reliability of hard drives.  One interesting result is that they don’t appear to be as susceptible to higher temperatures as most of us think.  In fact, drives running in cooler conditions appear to be more failure-prone.  

Also, the rumors about certain models from certain manufacturers failing more often than the rest of the pack appear to be borne out, although Google doesn’t name any names.

ExtremeTech has more info, and a link to the complete Google study results.

Really appreciated the "heads up" on this study.  To me, the key findings were (quoting from the Conclusion):

"We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors. First errors in reallocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts are also strongly correlated to higher failure probabilities."