In their study company included disks that have worked since mid-April this year. In total, there was 613 failures in the 14,719 disk-years of hard drives for home users, and 17 failures in 368 disk-years of hard drives for professional use. That is, home drives had annual percentage breakdowns of 4.2 %, while the professional ones had 4.6 % .

But the study should be taken with a grain of salt since the drives are not working in the same conditions. Professional drives have worked in servers that are performing transactions, while household models were used primarily for storage. Also, there is a clear difference in disk-years, and Backblaze in their solutions also uses a special casing that significantly mitigate the vibration characteristic for server environments, making it easier to work home models to operate, as opposed to professional drives that are not designed to handle it these situations.

[Ed - as mentioned this study is somewhat misleading. Profesional drives are intneded to deal with much higher work loads than your average consumer class disk. The study also did not appear to differentiate between the speed or type of disks (spindle speed and SAS Vs SATA). Overall we find the study to be higly inaccurate. It is trying to compare tow very differnt types of hardware, under different working conditions and establish a parallel. This is not an accurate way to make any sort of comparrison...]

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