[Alupis]

Google uses standard off-the-shelf sata drives too.

Too many disk failures to be worth spending money on the expensive "enterprise" drives when a standard SATA drive will due the job just fine (especially in arrays like this -- plenty of spindles to get performance)

[danudey]

Backblaze also uses off-the-shelf HDDs (including, when HDDs were in short supply after the flood in Thailand, buying USB drives and tearing the case off). They publish a lot of reliability numbers on drives as well (which match up quite well with my own experiences), as well as cost/GB numbers.

[Alupis]

I remember that! I think "This Developer's Life" or a similar podcast interviewed them about trying to game the walmart hdd rationing (2 per customer) and stuff.