Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2016
Backblaze's environment is abnormal.  They do very little to dampen vibration amongst other things, based on their last pod design.  That puts drives under stresses that don't reflect what you're likely to see in your environments.What you're seeing is not the most reliable, but the most reliable under their particular set of bad conditions.  The reliability under your circumstances might be wildly different.Their pod approach even results in worse performance: more vibration results in more effort spent by the drives trying to keep the head positioned in the right places, increasing latencies and decreasing read performance.  The higher density they push for with their pods actually compounds this.  Drives vibrate.  Fans vibrate (chassis, PSU, CPU, the works) .  If you don't pad them all appropriately, the vibration of the components ends up causing the entire rack to vibrate.  By the time you've got several dozen of drives in the rack, the whole rack will be feeling the effect.