Which Are the Most Reliable Hard Drives?

All mechanical hard drives fail after a while. For consumers, it may not be that big of an issue as long as data is properly backed up, but for businesses, a higher failure rate may lead to extra maintenance costs and downtime.

As a cloud storage company, Backblaze has lots of drive, and by a lot, we mean over 140,000 hard drives from different vendors, and they happen to provide quarterly and yearly updates to the failure rates of different drives. The latest one is for Q2 2020.

Drive days represent the number of days, hard drives were operational during the period, basically drive count x (365/4) – maintenance/replacement days. AFR stands for “Annualized Failure Rate”. HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard drive acquired by Western Digital in 2012, but the company still sells HGST parts… More on that later.

There were three drive models without any failure during the April-June 2020 quarter: HGST HUH728080ALE600 (8TB), Seagate ST6000DX000 (6TB), and Toshiba MD04ABA400V (4TB). BackBlaze points out the latter did not have a single failure since Q4 2018 or 54,054 drive days.

The good news is that the AFR is constantly decreasing dropping from 1.8% in Q2 2019 to under 1% for the first time in Q2 2020. What we don’t see in this table is the average life of the drives, so it may be important to have a look at a longer-term chart.

If you care about reliability HGST hard drives seem to be the way to go. There’s a lot of variation for some other brands due in part because the company has less WDC and Toshiba drives. Wait… but why does Western Digital Corporation (WDC) chart stop in Q1 2019?

That’s because Backblaze simply stopped using drives from Western Digital with the official reason being WD could not meet price and/or availability requirements from the company. Seagate had over double the failure rate of HGST drives, but for some reason, they get on adding more over the years. Seagate AFR still dropped to 0.9% so it’s improved a lot.

The cumulative annualized hard drive failure chart smoothens the results and does not look good at all for Western Digital, with HGST and Toshiba drives being the most reliable based on Backblaze data. But as Andy Klein, Director of Compliance at Backblaze, explains it’s important to focus on the drive model instead of just the manufacturer. You’ll find all historical data on Backblaze website.

Via Liliputing

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.