Backblaze is data storage company that is well known for their quarterly reports on consumer level hard drive failure rates. It is a little unusual for this type of company to use consumer level drives, but they have had good results and considerable cost savings taking this route. Today they have released the results of their hard drive usage for the second quarter of 2016.
As usual, the HGST drives used by Backblaze are producing excellent results, but surprisingly, the Seagate drives have virtually matched them in reliability. Backblaze introduced 8tb sized drives into their arrays recently, and the failure rates for those two companies are in a dead heat, with HGST 8tb drives showing a 3.2% failure rate and Seagate 3.3%.
Backblaze prefers to use what they call annulized failure rate to evaluate the performance of the drives they use. This is their explanation of that metric:
The annualized failure rate is computed as follows: ((Failures)/(Drive Days/365)) * 100. Therefore consider the number of “Failures” and “Drive Days” before reaching any conclusions about the failure rate.
You may notice that there are considerably fewer Western Digital or Toshiba drives used by Backblaze. They say that those two companies seem reluctant to sell to them, at least at competitive prices, and even HGST doesn't often match Seagate on price, so their arrays have become dominated by Seagate drives.
As a final note, the 2tb drives are being retired, and Backblaze commented that the HGST 2tb drives were outstanding, and continuing to function well even after five years of heavy use.
You can read more at the Backblaze site.
