Given that the manufacturer knows that Backblaze publishes its influential drive stats... do we know that the drive units that the manufacturer ships to Backblaze are representative of the quality of the same models available at retail?
> Do we know if these drives are the same as you would purchase in a retail outlet
Seagate (for instance) won't sell ANYBODY drives directly, so they force us to get bids from various resellers and distributors. So when we pick the lowest price, I don't think Seagate knows who the drives are going to, but there might be a trick in there somewhere I am not aware of.
Every drive must go through a series of tests before it is judged suitable for sale to the consumer. Drives that fall below a certain threshold are judged 'failed' but there can be a variety of drives that fall within the 'passed' range. Some are just barely above the threshold, others are way above.
It is kind of like binning for CPUs. The very best ones can have their base clocks increased and sold at a premium. The same kind of differentiation could be done for hard drives.
They also definitely did a binning process where all drives being sold to certain manufacturers would be heavily tested for certain types of failure modes and only those that passed the most rigorous tests in a certain area would be approved to be sold to certain manufacturers.
Of course, each manufacturer had their own things that they were concerned about.
I don't know if they still do binning today, but they certainly did it back in 1989.