Color me skeptical. I bought into this, at first. After reading some other stuff, not so much.
Like this, for example: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/dispelling-backblaze-...
Like this, for example: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/dispelling-backblaze-...
1. They rip hard drives from external enclosures.
2. They have too much vibration in their pods.
3. They don't correct for temperature.
4. They worked the drives too hard.
The whole article reads like the excuses of someone with a vested interest in discrediting evidence of their favorite brand's poor performance. I don't think the take away from the data provided by Backblaze is "I can expect to get a failure rate of exactly 1.231971 if I buy brand X's hard drives." The end-user-useful conclusions are things like "HGST's drives are the best," and "6TB drives are less reliable than 4TB drives right now."
Sure, all of the factors listed in the criticism may play a role in the failure rates (except the external enclosure bit, since A. The majority of the "shucked" drives were 3TB, and B. They've outgrown that practice.) But they only have the weakest of justifications for believing that those factors vary systematically across the manufacturers. And indeed, even those factors did vary systematically we'd still get the right answer if we had made the more general conclusions. For example, if the vibrations in the seagate-only enclosures are greater than the vibrations in the HGST-only enclosures, that can only be because the HGST drives are better and vibrate less. Or alternatively, maybe the pods all vibrate the same, but HGST is better because it is more resistant to vibrations.
I regularly buy external HDDs, rip them out and put them into desktops and laptops, put them back in different enclosures, and so on. As a result, my HDDs experience a lot of movement and extreme temperatures (e.g. being left in the trunk of a car on a hot summer day). It's good to know which models are the most likely to survive such abuse in the long term.
It's also a bit disingenuous to criticize back blaze's methodology when you know that a 'comprehensive study' under more controlled conditions will NEVER actually happen with the necessary sample size to draw conclusions.
Stress testing is a valid methodology for determining reliability - eg car makers crash their cars into walls at high speed to make sure they are safe, or use a robot to push the brake pedal a million times to see when it fails - so they hardly deserve criticism for pushing the drives hard. More information for the consumer is a good thing.
I remember a study Google did on harddrive reliability and it seemed to show that heat had little to no effect on it. I also don't regard consumer-level as being a bad thing. As a consumer, I kind of want to know which drives are built for abuse better. All drives fail; which drives fail more and at what cost?