How to Determine a Drive's Reliability?

Just went through the article explaining Tom's newest storage test platform. Is it just me, or do the benchmarks reveal nothing about a hard disk or SSD's ultimately reliability? Sure, there are benchmarks on how quickly the various tested drives read and write data, but I'd rather rely on the most reliable hard disk; how do we determine this?

All you can use are reputation, personal experience, and the experience of others.

MTBF also does not mean much. A drive manufacturer can release a new model with a 400,000 hour (about 6 years) MTBF. How do they know? Because it is a new model, they certainly didn't exercise a number of drives until they failed, average the time, and announce the drive's mean time to failure.

It's a statistical thing.

Actually, the drive manufacturer does test the drives in rather impressive numbers, including heating them beyond spec while running them and other high wear methods. That is how MTBF and similar numbers are determined. They can't catch every problem though, so MTBF is only accurate if there are no additional failure modes that the manufacturer didn't catch in initial testing.