Backblaze publishes data on specific hard drive reliability

Backblaze is an online data storage company that uses thousands of consumer grade hard drives in their operation.  A few months ago, they released some interesting statistics showing the rate of failure of their drives over time.  But they did not show the failure rate of specific models at that time.  The newest entry at the Backblaze blog does just that.

In 2013, Backblaze was using 27,134 consumer grade drives.  They buy drives based primarily on price, and they had mostly Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital brand drives.  They did find that there were two specific drives that would not work well in their particular hardware configuration, and so they are no longer used by Backblaze.  Those two drives are the Western Digital Green 3TB drives, and the Seagate LP (low power) 2TB drives.

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Here is a graph showing the failure rate of their drives, broken down by brand:

blog-fail-drives-manufactureAnd here is the 36 month survival rate of the drives by brand:

blog-survival-drives-by-monthThe Seagate drives do not seem to be doing quite as well as the Hitachi and Western Digital drives overall, but there are still some individual models that Backblaze endorses from Seagate, including the Seagate 4TB Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000).

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Backblaze has provided quite a lot more information at their blog, with stats for individual models from these manufacturers.  I recommend taking a look.   Here is the link:  Backblaze Blog. 

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