Backblaze is an online backup and software company that offer unlimited backup space on almost everything on your PC and Mac for a low monthly fee and has dealt with over 27,000 harddisks till date since launch in 2007. Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital are their most used harddisk brands and they have broken down some interesting statistics on the failure rates of the drives within a year and the survivability rate over a period of 3 years. How did the drives fare? Check out the graphs below:
[[perfectpullquote]]Hitachi drives are most reliable here with Western Digital ones coming a better second[/[perfectpullquote]]
Seagate takes the lead (not a good thing) on the highest percentage of failed drives in a year, particularly on their 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 (ST31500341AS) drives. Hitachi drives are most reliable here with Western Digital ones coming a better second. It’s interesting to note that Seagate 4TB drives Seagate Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000) perform a lot more reliable than the 3TB or 1TB. Notice Hitachi highest 4TB drives have a slightly higher failure rates than its lower size counterparts, perhaps complacency on their latest drives?
By the end of a 3-year period running 24/7, Hitachi and Western Digital still has at least around 95% of the drives still going strong. Seagate drives are obviously less reliable by a wide margin, with a good percentage of drives failing after the a year in operation. For more detail analysis of the results and the harddisk models, do read more about it at Backblaze’s original blog post.
