Cloud backup provider BackBlaze has released its annual hard drive reliability statistics, offering an in-depth look at which hard drives and which hard drive manufacturers, provide the most reliable drives out there. Although not an exhaustive or detailed test, the statistics look at which of the many thousands of drives employed by the backup provider, failed throughout the year, at what rate and after how long.
Backblaze has been releasing its hard drive failure rate stats for the past few years and it's given us an interesting insight into the state of the hard drive storage industry. As drive sizes have increased and more data is committed to them, reliability is more and more important. In this latest release, some 60,000+ drives were considered as part of the study and the results are interesting to say the least.
The worst manufacturer according to the statistics, was Seagate. Its annualized failure rates ranged from 2.9 percent, to nine percent and in the case of one specific drive, 29 percent -- though that latter result is skewed by virtue of only having one drive of that type fail as part of 60 considered in the study. Other stats were more relevant however. The nine percent failure rate was recorded from nine drives of 392 failing throughout the year, while the near three percent stat recorded 235 drives failing of a total 32,070.
Western Digital drives were the second most/least-reliable, with a handful of drives failing throughout the year.
The real standout in the study though, and perhaps the best take-home information from the whole report, is that HGST drives were by far the most reliable. With more than 22,000 drives used over the year, only 22 drives failed. As Hexus reports, this has been the case year after year, giving us a good idea of which manufacturer we're opting for next time we upgrade our storage.
