Exactly - they come with all those things. However, at Backblaze we run both our 25,000 consumer hard drives and the enterprise drives in RAID arrays, and the consumer drives are run in enclosures that have MORE vibrations => and still the consumer drives performed better from a reliability perspective.

Exactly - companies make money on "extended warranties"; that's why they offer them (and why many companies push them so hard.) Like insurance, they are doing math to determine a price point where the average failures cost less than the amount they charge. If a single failure is not catastrophic to you (for example, your house burning down), you shouldn't pay for the risk-adjusted extra cost.

Agree 100% with you. And if you have 100 drives you can buy a mere 5 spares, which temporarily costs you 5% extra vs. the 100% extra that the enterprise drives cost up-front...and both are likely to fail at the same rate.

Yes, many of the vendors require you to use "their" hard drives. For example, at Backblaze, the Dell storage systems we use for for the central servers have "Dell" drives. Realistically, those are simply WD or Seagate drives with a different badge. Regardless, the failure rate of these drives that are "by Dell, for Dell, in a Dell"...still fail more often that plain 'ol consumer drives.

The drive companies claim that the enterprise drives are designed to work at a higher level of usage. However, at Backblaze we have been running both the 25,000 consumer hard drives and the enterprise drives in this study 24x7.