Ok, this is supposed to be a sub, where common myths have no place, alas that's not the case. My only gripe is that someone will read this shit and starts to quote / believe it as it has some merit.

Can you give a source to this 56% failure rates? The only one i could find is based on data from 2009, from a small data-recovery company in Russia.

Worst case - you mean Backblaze. This company created a lot of pseudo-specialists when it comes to HDD reliability. We get it - its easy to read 8-bar graphs and it gives you a feeling like you know the entire industry. But Backblaze shouldn't be an argument when you try to compare failure rates:

Why:

• Backblaze uses redundancy to lower the cost and purchases second-hand / refurb drives whenever they can. This immediately means that you can't provide reliable stats as portion of your sample size may arrive faulty.
• They don't have an equal sample size for each storage capacity. For example Seagate may have 1000 drives and WD 10. Extrapolations turns this from reports to predictions.
• We don't know in what conditions they use those drives. The Backblaze pods put 40+ drives in a 4U/6U chassy and commodity hardware isn't that coping that well with heat / vibration and continuous use.
• Backblaze does not disclose the sourcing of the drives. Sometimes the same models, from the same manufacturer can be "different" from region - to region.

The "reliability" report is just a marketing campaign from Backblaze. Why no one else in the industry "thought" of doing it - mostly, because the data is useless (as chances are you won't have even remotely close setup or sourcing), especially to end-users at home thinking about getting a new drive.

In short - HDDs fail for a lot of reasons. Its rarely that easy to say - that model is really bad (unless there's a bad batch) or even say a company is bad. Negative bias is dangerous when it comes to consumer-grade hardware and the best people can do is to check consumer reviews from a few different sources (amazon, new egg etc) before getting a particular model.