Backblaze already acknowledged that their usage environment doesn't reflect that of normal consumer, yet the author harps on the point.
The author tries to debunk Backblaze's claim that it found no correlation between drive temperature and failure rate. Yet he presents no evidence that Backblaze's methodolgy was wrong.
Backblaze had large enough sample to have even distribution of drives in various temperature, rack, and load environment. I doubt they put all Seagate drives in the middle shelf of Ver. 1 racks where it was the hottest, but put all Hitachi drives in the bottom of the Ver. 3 racks where it was cooler and more stable.
Unless there is another study that shows failure rate of these drives in normal consumer environment, Seagate's 3-5x failure rate should give people a pause.