Q:

What does "180TB per year workload" mean on the WD Red 12TB

I'm asking because badblocks will write the full capacity of the disk 4 times and read it 4 times. Would that mean a hit of 96TB on my HD workload or a hit of 48TB?
I read that HD workload ratings started to be used because the higher capacity hard drives use a much more intense writing process. In that case, it should only apply to writes. Or is WD saying 180TB/year workload for a typical use case with a 2 to 1 read/write mix?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/03/when_did_hard_drives_get_workload_rate_limits/

A:

Following @tonny's suggestion, here's what I got from customer support:

Workload of 180TB/y is combined read/write. No
  information regarding Read/write ratios is available.

This seems like the marketing department running away with an engineering limitation to squeeze more money by pushing WD Gold's with their 550TB/yr rating. 
That's not to say that they aren't different... the controllers of the WD Red's might use cheaper capacitors/resistors, which I think is legal as long as you're upfront about it... and by giving us that low workload limit, they are technically being upfront. Like @sprbrn said, the controllers typically fail first, which is really strange as that's the easiest thing to build to last.

