I truly appreciate Backblaze publishing these but it's paramount to remember their disk usage pattern is fundamentally different than yours. This data is almost irrelevant to majority of their audience trying to deduce something out of it to help their buying decisions.

In addition to usage patterns, there's a lot more that contributes to mean time between failure of hard drives; like operating temperature (ambient, fluctuations, max), relative humidity, vibration and alike.

There's also well researched and published literature around this.

From Microsoft 2016: Finds relative humidity to be the dominant factor for disk failure https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast16/fast16...

From UToronto 2012: Finds no correlation with DRAM failures, nor high temp and disk failure but concludes temperature variability affects disk reliability more than maximum operating temperature http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/temperature_cam.pdf

From Google 2007: cannot find strong correlation between failure rate and temperature or utilization. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

From Microsoft 2013: focuses on operating temperature being the driving factor of failure, more than load. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/acmtos13.pdf