I would never buy one and I wouldn't recommend that anyone else should, either. Backblaze was one of the first ones to the table with hard data showing that 3TB Barracudas just aren't durable and generally unreliable. Are there people that are using them successfully? Yes, but there are tons of other horror stories out there. At this point it is pretty common knowledge in the tech world that the 3TB Seagate drives are simply not reliable. Anyone that buys a HDD based solely on Backblaze data results is lazy but there are certainly some takeaways that are of great value. While the results may not directly correspond to drive reliability in home use it is certainly not garbage. You might find some of our reliability data useful in determining which ones might be more reliable for you.' For average Joe and I the data is a large sample stress test. They simply said, 'Hey, we are using thousands of consumer grade drives.

They never claimed that Desktop was any better or worse than Enterprise. Backblaze has simply stated that they feel that it is a better value to use consumer grade drives than it is to use enterprise grade. Where/when did Backblaze ever mention enterprise drives? I don't get the Backblaze data bashing that whines about using Desktop drives in an enterprise environment. Their crusade of taking this data and translating it into which drive is more reliable for a consumer is misguided because these drives were never designed for such an environment. So what BB is really doing is making the case that consumer drives can be deployed where enterprise drives are normally used, thus saving money. But BB's data, presumably, is not accessed nearly as much as a db server since they are a cloud storage provider. Ordinarily enterprise class drives equipped with special vibration dampeners, etc. This is a very rough use case for drives due to high temperatures, vibration, etc.

They deploy the drives in custom rackmount units that house something like 60 drives side by side.

Backblaze blog reliability