HGST has been consistently the most reliable over the years though, especially at the 4TB level, wherein each of the past three years it has achieved a sub-one percent failure rate.

While the number of 6TB Seagate drives used by Backblaze has remained constant for the past three years, the failure rate has fallen from 2.2 percent to 0.7 percent. Western Digital has also seen improvements with its 6TB models.

Although its drives did experience the highest failure rate of Backblaze hard drives in the last quarter, drive reliability does appear to be gradually improving. Other annualized failure rates saw two percent and even nearly three percent in one category.Īlthough other drives had estimated rates of as high as 29 percent, those were far smaller sample sizes, so are arguably not as accurate. Backblaze's quarterly and annual HDD reliability reports, while not perfect, provide insight into a handful of storage models that the public is typically not privy to. In the case of one of the 8TB Seagate drives, 44 failed from around 14,000, equating to an annualized failure rate of 1.22 percent. Tue // 16:00 UTC Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze has released a comprehensive report detailing reliability statistics for the hard drives it operated during the whole of 2021, with an interesting finding on its older kit. Although the most popular drives used by Backblaze, with a total of 67,787 drives tracked by the study, it also saw the highest failure rates. Seagate’s statistics however, paint a far grimmer picture. That same annualized failure rate for Western Digital drives was slightly worse, though with a sample size of 662 drives, those statistics are not quite as compelling. As of the end of Q1 2015 we had 44,252 HDDs spinning in our datacenter. Seagate’s 12TB IronWolf and Barracuda hard drives bolster storage inside and out Hard Drive Reliability Stats for Q1 2015, Over the past year we’ve been releasing HDD reliability statistics based on the drives we use to store customer data for our online backup business. Seagate speeds up data access on its hard drives, but they won’t match SSDs

Backblaze hdd reliability