They often have good posts about drive reliability although they use consumer drives which are very different from the enterprise drives that most storage vendors ship.
On a side note, I worked at HP during the Thailand flooding and can tell you that the hard drive issues were real. HD prices were increasing and we could not get the quantities we needed. I saw shortages that impacted our ship first hand.
Given all these challenges it is no surprise that failure rates would go up for consumer drives. The HD companies were struggling to fill orders and they were trying to do everything they could to increase volumes. It is likely that these pressures could lead to more aggressive testing and a potential decrease in quality. Consumer drives would likely be the ones that were most directly impacted since they are typically the lowest quality.
