Enterprise drives typically range from 18000rpm at the very high end...10K rpm probably the most common for bulk storage
Backblaze pays something like $45,000 / month in our electrical bill. We vastly prefer "green" drives that spin slower and use less electricity. There are many, many "Enterprise" applications in the world that are not bottle necked on spindle speed (like backup and Shutterfly-type big-data-rarely-accessed), those enterprises deserve slower drives. I guess I object to using the word "Enterprise" to describe "Fast" - why not just mark your drive as 15,000 RPM or 7,200 RPM and be done with it? No need to add the pointless label "Enterprise Drive".
SMART reporting is much more consistent for enterprise drives
No way. All hard drives do SMART reporting. Sometimes the "bridge" between the processor and the hard drives won't pass the information, so a cheap USB enclosure might be hiding the hard drive SMART stuff from you, but that isn't the hard drive's fault. In fact, we have an expensive Dell drive shelf with an LSI (?) controller that hides our enterprise drive SMART stats from us, very annoying. There is no correlation between "Enterprise" and "SMART reporting".
some manufactures are intentionally disabling typical enterprise firmware features on the consumer models, drive commands that are helpful for hardware raid
The whole concept of RAID is that it is a software layer on top of all the cheap drives. RAID doesn't require any interesting instructions. Pretty much needs to write data to an individual drive and read it back later.
I wouldn't be surprised if usage patterns over 5-10yrs resulted in a significant divergence.
Time will prove you right or wrong, we plan on updating and releasing these numbers every few years. Stay tuned....