Yeah, I've always been disappointed at the lack of statistical information that hosts provide about drive failures, especially failure correlation in RAID situations. When I'm trying to price out some servers on a typical bare metal host's website it is hard to evaluate different configurations, and they are the ones that have the most real-world information, sitting in their support system. Very few publish this kind of info, so I really appreciate the efforts of Backblaze.
It might because folks are afraid that their partners won't sell them drives. You know, if you're working directly with Hitachi or WD or Seagate and you publish stats saying they aren't great, they don't have much incentive to continue working with you, or at least not as cheerfully.
Since we buy off-the-shelf drives from distributors and online, we don't really feel the the heat that much. We'd love to work directly with the manufacturers, but the minimum orders (over 10,000 drives) are not really feasible for us.
