[cuchulain]

Drive vendors are now publishing per-year write workloads for drives.

EG, datacentre-grade SATA and near-line SAS drives like the WD RE (https://www.wdc.com/en-um/products/business-internal-storage...) and Seagate Enterprise Capacity (http://www.seagate.com/au/en/enterprise-storage/hard-disk-dr...) are rated for 550TB/year.

Lower-end drives (NAS, cold-storage, desktop models) are rated less.

Seagate's overall Enterprise/Datacentre lineup (http://www.seagate.com/au/en/enterprise-storage/hard-disk-dr...) ranges from 180TB/year to 550TB/year, and elsewhere on Seagate's site they indicate that a 550TB/year is "10x more than desktop drives".

These are all just ratings though. The theory is that over a population of drives, you'll see a higher failure rate than predicted if you do higher than the rated workload per year. WDC used to have a whitepaper on it called "Why Specify Workload", but it's no longer on their site.

I have in some cases seen enterprise sata drives pushed to the kinds of workload you're talking about - 2.5PB in a year - and seen in the order of 10% fail over that time, with a drive that normally has a ~0.5% AFR.