My 2¢: I've been on Hetzner for a few months, experimentally, and the sporadic 'offline uncorrectable sector' emails I'm getting from smartd are making me nervous.

Maybe you're not stressing your disks enough. I recently setup a database server and a disk broke (as in becoming unaccessible, not just bad sectors) within a day.

I seem to recall a research by Google which concluded that stress is not really an important factor in disk reliability... Can't find a link now though.

Of course, that doesn't make parent's claim any more true; just pointing out that this is probably not the reason.

is this the google research paper you were talking about: https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrus... ?

Presumably his bad experiences make him say this.

He only added this clarification after I asked, so my question is not as redundant as it would seem.