>It's not a best practice, but the last 10 years I've run my home server with a smaller faster drive for the OS and a single larger disk for bulk storage that I choose using Backblaze Drive Stats. None of have failed yet (fingers-crossed). I really trust their methodology and it's an extremely valuable resource for me as a consumer.

I also have multiple drives in operation in the past decade and didn't experience any failures. However unlike you, I didn't use backblaze's drive stats to inform my purchase. I just bought whatever was cheapest, knowing that any TCO reduction from higher reliability (at best, around 10%) would eaten up by the lack of discounts the "best" drive. That's the problem with n=1 anecdotes. You don't know whether nothing bad happened because you followed "the right advice", or you just got lucky.