BackBlaze Takes a Second Look at Hard Drive Reliability, Finds Capacity Matters

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Making the case for 4TB hard drives

It was a year ago that cloud backup firm BackBlaze revealed some interesting data it had collected in regards to hard drive failure rates. For a number of reasons, trying to analyze the reliability of hard drive brands and models can be complicated, though when the dust settled, BackBlaze determined that Hitachi brand HDDs were the best. With another year of operation under its belt, BackBlaze has more data to share, though Hitachi remains a solid option.
At the end of 2013, BackBlaze was running 27,134 hard drives. That number increased to 41,213 at the end of 2014, giving BackBlaze a large sample size to evaluate. It's also worth noting that most of the new drives BackBlaze purchased were 4TB, along with a few 6TB HDDs. As the firm discovered, size matters when it comes to HDD reliability.
So does brand. BackBlaze recorded a frightening 43.1 percent failure rate among 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 HDDs, though just a 2.6 percent failure rate among 4TB Seagate Desktop HDD.15 drives.

Source: BackBlaze
"We like every one of the 4 TB drives we bought this year. For the price, you get a lot of storage, and the drive failure rates have been really low," BackBlaze said. "The Seagate Desktop HDD.15 has had the best price, and we have a LOT of them. Over 12 thousand of them. The failure rate is a nice low 2.6 percent per year. Low price and reliability is good for business.
"The HGST drives, while priced a little higher, have an even lower failure rate, at 1.4 percent. It’s not enough of a difference to be a big factor in our purchasing, but when there’s a good price, we grab some. We have over 12 thousand of these drives."
Brand, model, and capacity all seem to matter to some extent, which makes coming to a definitive conclusion a bit tricky. And of course this is but a single company's results. Generally speaking, however, HGST put on the best showing with the lowest failure rates at each capacity.
Check out BackBlaze's blog post for more details.
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