> how? high end HDD offer 2M MTBF, and with something like HGST 7K6000 you end up with pallet loads being retired at 50K hours run time 100% defect free.

The warranty says you only get 75 or 125 full drive writes on the two higher end 20TB drives I looked at.

I can't tell you why it's that low, but that's what it says.

> how? SSDs usually just die without any warning

Sometimes SSDs just die, sometimes they go read-only. Sometimes HDDs just die too. Do you have any numbers?