I have a feeling that with Backblaze that ALL of their drives are mostly powered on continuously until they fail (i.e. they might sit for a bit at their data center waiting to go into one of their pods, but after that they pretty much run until they fail).
Backblaze Employee here - this is correct. Pods get powered up, then pummeled with customer data until full. Then they stay spinning forever, but the rate of writes drops to "churn" rates for the rest of the drive's life. This use pattern is all we have experience with, so if your application is different (maybe a database that gets heavy load forever) then your outcomes may vary.
