I don't see any problem with Backblaze's results. They had a lot of drives and they simply said how they performed. This Henry Newman's accusation is ridiculous.

"The oldest drive in the list is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive from 2006. A drive that is almost 8 years old!"

Beautiful manipulation. ONE Seagate out of 13000 is 8 years old. There there was a specific column for age. Statistically oldest drives they have are WDs.

Add to this that the Seagate 1.5 TB has a well-known problem that Seagate publicly admitted to, it is no surprise that these old drives are failing.

ALL 1.5TB Seagates have a well-known problem. Which means they openly admitted, their HDDs are unreliable.

Aside for that, I had some personal experience with Seagate. Three Barracudas 7200.12 1TB. Two of them worked two years, the other one year and a half. Meanwhile, almost 10 year old 400 GB Hitachi is fine with 0 bad sectors. Maybe it's anecdotal evidence or bad batch, but don't be surprised when your Seagate gain 500 bad sectors overnight. :)