Probably just more sensitive to vibration in long term use. 40% AFR in normal conditions would be insane, and I doubt we'd need Backblaze to point it out.

I have six ST3000DM001's and seven ST31500341AS's, all with about 2 years on the clock (~20,000 power-on hours). With 40% and 25% AFR's respectively, the odds of all thirteen surviving are:

1 / ((0.6 12) * (0.75 14)) = 1 in 25,782.

I doubt I'm that lucky.

Are you referring to the botched firmware ones (I think the firmware revision was SD15)?

If so, at the time (~2008) I had an HTPC with 10 1TB-1.5TB drives with 6 of 10 affected by the firmware issues. I was able to successfully flash all my drives at the time with no data loss.

i built a pc for a family friend around that time... i'd spec'd it with a different drive, but they showed it to the IT guy at their work who recommended seagate. 6 months later the drive stopped working, and it had to be shipped to the other side of the world to be reflashed

Sadly you could only flash them if they were still working, you had to ship them if they bricked. I saw the bulletin and promptly flashed all mine before failure. Big pita tho.

I've got a sample size of 1 on those things. Glad it's not more, cause it made for an unhappy thanksgiving time when it failed.

I have five Seagate branded 3TB external disks, so have no real idea what's inside.

Three of them are dead. I stopped using the others.

agreed. I think I had around 7 different barracuda 7200's.. not a single one remains operable, all failed, though they did survive >1yr, they just didn't have the longevity of WD's or Hitachi's which ran on the same infra (and in most cases, continue to run).

One failure from one drive bought for me too.