Population level statistics aren’t informative at the individual sample level. If you buy 100 hard drives, a 2% failure rate makes sense and you can reason what

Population level statistics aren’t informative at the individual sample level. If you buy 100 hard drives, a 2% failure rate makes sense and you can reason what it means. You’d expect two of those drives to fail in a year. But what does that mean if you only buy two drives total? An individual drive can’t fail by 2%. It has either failed or it hasn’t (ignoring bad blocks, etc). So, for home use, the Backblaze statistics are interesting, but can you really tell the difference between a 2% failure rate and a 3% failure rate when you buy a small number or drives (or likely just one)? You’re most likely to not see any failures from either vendor, as they have a success rate of either 97 or 98%. It’s only when your sample sizes get sufficiently large that these failure rates start to have a good predictive value.