Low annual failure rates for all! Well, for MOST.
If you've not heard, the online backup company Backblaze has been conducting its own hard drive reliability study for the past 2 years (since 2013). Initially, its results were somewhat compressed, but as time has progressed, they've become accustomed to releasing more in-depth updates multiple times a year.
In the latest set of results for the first quarter of 2015 (as published toward the end of May), it appears there is...no clear winner. When I say "winner", I mean "this drive model has no failures to speak of, even though it has been in use for multiple years and there are multiple thousands of that particular drive model in use".
Now, let me clarify: there ARE drive models within Backblaze's charts with zero failures. And that's fantastic! But those drive models are also comparatively fewer in number, or are younger in age.
Unfortunately, there are ALSO drives that have been around for at least one year and have failure rates in the double digits. Even more unfortunately, these are Seagate drives, particularly models that had a rough reputation early on for early wear and failure.
If you have been keeping score at home, you'll also know that Seagate seems to have accepted that it can and will release firmware updates to help keep its drives healthy and running smoothly; they've released firmware updates for their multi-terabyte desktop drives as well as its premium/performance 2.5" drives (such as their older 7200 RPM 500 GB drive and their hybrid drives with both 4 and 8 GB of NAND), often with goals of preventing a premature failure (physical or logical), reducing heat output, reducing drive noise, or fixing bugs that result in sudden drops in drive performance.
But if you've been keeping score at home, you'll also realize that these firmware updates still did not happen for every drive line that they offered, and beyond one or two series that had major growing pains, Seagate's overall reliability still has not been a major concern. Also, you'll note that two of the low-scoring drive models (both being early 1.5 TB models) have an average age of 5 years. 5 years of consumer-grade hard drives in a data center environment, used to constantly serve data! It somewhat makes up for the poor aging shown by those drives.
The other Seagate outlier, a more recent 3 TB model, has an average age of nearly two-and-a-half years....but it is also one of the models which has had a firmware update; without knowing what firmware was on the earliest shipping drives received by Backblaze, and without knowing whether they bother to update the firmware, we cannot say whether this failure rate is accurate to the general consumer world. (Ratings on retailers like Newegg would emphatically say "YES, THESE HARD DRIVES ARE JUST THAT BAD", but a large portion of negative reviews on e-retailers also spawns from drives which are dead on arrival.)
Overall, other than the aforementioned Seagate slipups, and a minor blemish on the Western Digital side of things, the overall reliability chart seems to lead to the old adage of "Stick with what you know".
Still, if you are forced to pick a drive for constant-on reliability, it really looks like getting an HGST (formerly Hitachi) drive couldn't go wrong. With thousands of consumer models humming alongside thousands of enterprise models, the reliability scores usually don't drift above one percent (1%) per year, with the outliers being on drives that are >3 years old. None of the HGST drive models have an average age equivalent to that of the oldest drives in the lineup (4.1 years for HGST, 5.0/5.1 years for 1.5 TB Seagate models), but as some of the older drives in the Backblaze servers, the Hitachi drives appear to be holding up just fine.
Given more time, it will be interesting to find out what happens with the Toshiba and Western Digital models listed. The overall count of drives from either manufacturer is fairly low, which makes it hard to take either into consideration. Beyond 450 units of one WD model and 1000 units of another WD model, the sample size may simply be too small to consider them in this roundup; with any luck, pricing factors will make models from either manufacturer more attractive so we can get more points of reference. For these manufacturers, it may actually be just as easy as looking at a Newegg score, flipping through reviews, and seeing what they say. (Currently, both manufacturers seem to hover around a 3.5-star out of 5 rating, though some models have a woefully low review count, not unlike Backblaze's data.)
So, can consumers get something out of this latest batch of data? Sure, if you're going HGST, Seagate, or (selectively) Western Digital.
Toshiba? Not so much right now, though it seems they're not having many issues. Also note that Toshiba acquired Hitachi's production assets, so you might be well off to lump them in with what HGST is bringing to the table. Backblaze seems to be interested in acquiring more of the Toshiba drives in the future, so...time will tell.
As for enterprise drives? Not so much to be gained from this set of results, though it's not likely for there to be a reliability issue in that field.
Are you getting drives that may experience frequent thermal cycles and power cycles? Well...that data isn't present.
Going for 2.5" drives? Data not found (though it would be interesting to see mobile drives somehow incorporated...).
I digress. You get the point.
But there's still some major benefit to Backblaze's findings, and I can't wait to see what this coming quarter's results look like.
To see the fancy charts and here the comments from Backblaze itself (with more context as to what's truly going on behind the scenes), you can view the 1Q 2015 (January-March, published in May 2015) results here (link opens in a new window): https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/
For Backblaze's comments on the fairly recent procurement of Toshiba drive models (and why they don't have more yet), see their blog post here (link opens in a new window): https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-look-at-backblazes-toshiba-hard-drives/
Have any questions, comments, or concerns? Think the study is a bunch of hogwash? Wish StorageReview had an up-to-date set of reliability statistics? Have any personal stories to tell about any one manufacturer? Still miss Samsung's HDD division & wish they didn't only make SSDs? Have an irrelevant comment about Backblaze's actual online backup service, where they lost your data because it was on one of those Seagate hard drives? Sound off in the comments below!
