"Switching hard drive manufacturers from Hitachi to Seagate and Western Digital. The assumption here is that all drives are the same and as we’ve learned that’s not really the case."
Where is the footnote. Why aren't they the same?
From their article on v2 they said: "The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully." http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...
There are other articles where they mention that they do testing and some brands perform better than others.
Having said that, my main little server at home hasn't had a power cycle for somewhat longer than a month as there have been no kernel updates or that like that have required it...