Brian from Backblaze here.
> If the hard drive can survive in the environment provided by Backblaze, then they will certainly do better in a home computer properly built
I suppose it matters. The pods are in a professional datacenter with air filters and sticky paper that we step on before entering the clean datacenter. When we open pods in the datacenter they are NEVER filled with dust bunnies. But when I open up my "properly built" gaming computer at home there are ALWAYS dust bunnies, air in homes with pets and carpets is simply going to have some dust.
Backblaze also monitors everything and fixes every problem, a home computer usually monitors nothing. Recently I was editing video on my laptop and it just shut off (I lost 10 minutes of edits). Turns out it was overheating due to a bad fan, but nothing WARNED me about this so I was subjecting all the components in the laptop to dangerously high levels of heat before the CPU shut down to protect itself. That won't happen in the Backblaze datacenter where we monitor everything, including the temperature of every last one of the 68,813 drives and go fix it when they deviate from normal for any reason.
One of the main things Backblaze does which may or may not occur in a home office is that we do leave the drives powered up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you leave your computer shut down half the time, there may be situations where that extends it's life in your home. For example, if the drives bearings inherently are built for 2 years of continuous run time and you only have the computer turned on 1/2 the time then your drive will last 4 years at home and only 2 years in the Backblaze datacenter.