And then there's this:

Google doesn't care if the next generation of hard drives is less reliable

Interesting point. If portable devices are all going to Flash, and the only systems to use Winchester drives are redundant arrays and cloud services, then it does make sense to plow forward with storage and speed, damn the reliability. That's really all that those Backblaze reports were ever saying. It's really interesting.

Local SOHO NAS units are still going to need reliability though, so that market segment will still exist for a while.

Interesting times.