One of the four identical Hitachi 2 TB HDDs (manufactured Nov 2010) in my own disk array died at 28,000 hours (about 3.2 years) today. The raidz-1 remained functional and I was able to replace the failed disk and resilver without big problems (first time I've done this) following the WIKI here, so thanks.
The SMART utility shows all three other drives as PASS, but they are all at 28,000 hours too, so I guess it is time to replace them soon.
As a practical rule of thumb, is 3 years about the maximum to expect from consumer-grade HDDs?
Backblaze publishes disk failure stats for their server farms and HGST came out best I think I read recently. Is it better to spend more for server-grade disks or do they also start to fail around 3 years? Any thoughts or advice on brands/models?