Backblaze just posted its data on failure rates of hard drives that it uses in its data center. At the end of 2014, it had 41,213 drives active for storing all of the data in its unlimited backup service.
It uses a variety of hard drive capacities across HGST (formerly Hitachi), Seagate and Western Digital. There is everything from 1.5TB to 6TB drives in operation.
The results are pretty much the same as what we saw from Backblaze’s data last year. HGST 4TB drives look like the top dog in terms of failure rates. Also, the Seagate 4TB drives (ST4000DM000) fare quite well in spite of the poor reliability of Seagate 3TB drives.
Last year, the WD 3TB Red drives looked like a hit; however, with more drives and time thrown into the mix for a larger sample size, the annualized failure rates have pushed to 6.9%.
Even if you don’t buy internal drives in this increasingly mobile world, Seagate drives are featured in all of you LaCie external drives and HGST make up all of the generally great G-Technology external drives out there. It’s also worth noting that WD acquired HGST a few years back; however, the companies’ operations remain separate at this point.
If you want to ogle at all the numbers, be sure to check out Backblaze‘s full post breakdown.
Love this info, thanks for the article.
I really need to get on top of my hard drives and back my data up properly, might look for some deals on some HGST drives.
I am really interested to see how the new Seagate Archive HDD fair, they seem incredibly cheap for 8TB! (ST8000AS0002).
Agreed. Those 8TB drives look nice. At the rate of file size growth, particularly for those who shoot video, we’re going to need 8TB and bigger drives sooner rather than later.
Tell me about it, i just returned from a week’s ski holiday with 559GB of data, mainly 4k videos from my Hero 4 but that kind of data creation needs big, reliable, well priced drives.
Whoa! That’s a lot of GoPro footage…