Backblaze is a cloud storage company which uses more than 50,000 consumer level hard drives in their business. They have made headlines over the last few years as one of the few sources for hard drive reliability statistics working with a large data set. They have now released their findings covering the third quarter of 2015, showing the failure rate of 26 different models of consumer grade drives, and they have included data from 2013 and 2014 for these same drives in comparison.
This is the first time that Backblaze has included data from their 1tb drives, which are slowly being phased out and replaced with larger capacity drives. Some of the poorest performers from previous reports are still doing very badly in the reliability figures. Seagate 1.5TB drives in particular, have had very poor results in the past and continue that trend in this latest report. Overall, Seagate is still trailing HGST and Western Digital when looking at the reliability of drives of 3TB or smaller, but with 4TB and larger drives, all the drives are doing better, and are comparable in performance.
Seagate has gotten some bad press in the past from these reports, but the final graph shown at the BackBlaze site tells us that as they replace the older drives and put in newer, higher capacity ones, the Seagate performance has risen above Western Digital slightly. Backblaze is particularly pleased with their 6TB Seagate drives. Hitachi/HGST drives are still doing better overall in the BackBlaze environment than any others.
You can read more on the story at the BackBlaze website.
