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.
True, and what those criticisms actually show is that Backblaze's data is highly relevant for the average consumer.
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.
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.