I do believe your experience, but started wondering what makes an enterprise drive more reliable than a consumer-targeted one. What's preventing the manufacturers from selling the same drive with two different names and prices? Reputation?
Enterprise class disks have significant behavioral differences when dealing with a bad sector, among other differences. Intel has a good paper on this subject. See 3.2.1:
I think mainly warranty, although other posters are saying enterprise drives have capacitors to help with writing during power loss. I'd have thought a good battery backed raid controller would handle this but "enterprise"="belt and braces" so I can see why a lot of businesses pay the extra.
Sorry, late to reply! The warranty differences are things like with enterprise they'll send you a new one as soon as the SMART data suggests it's going to fail. Consumer is usually you post it back and they send you a new one.
If you actually read the specification on consumer drives you'll see they're "guaranteed" for like 100 rewrites and you don't have any right to anything if they fail.
