Its time to reconsider your favorite hard drive brand. BackBlaze, a cloud backup firm has got some interesting data on hard disk reliability and hard disk life.
From its experience with 25,000 hard drives, BackBlaze has estimated the Failure rate, lifetime and reliability of major hard drive manufacturers.
Note: The study has been conducted over Least Expensive Hard Drives.
The result is surprising to see Seagate having the least reliability and high failure rates.
The result compares three major players in the HDD space, Hitachi, Western Digital and Seagate.
Annual Failure Rate
The average number of failures you can expect running one drive for a year. A failure is when the company have to replace a drive in a pod. From the graph, you can see, Seagate drives having the highest failure rates and Hitachi having the lowest failure rates.
Drive Lifetime
The chart below shows the cumulative survival rate for each brand. Month by month. Hitachi does really well. There is an initial die-off of Western Digital drives, and then they are nice and stable. The Seagate drives start strong, but die off at a consistently higher rate, with a burst of deaths near the 20-month mark. Having said that, you’ll notice that even after 3 years, by far most of the drives are still operating.
Seagate is the favorite of BackBlaze
Our current favorite is the Seagate Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000)…. Historically, Seagate drives have performed well at first, and then had higher failure rates later
Although, the report suggests that Seagte Drives are least reliable, a specific model of Seagate drive is still the favorite of BackBlaze. And the model is Seagate Desktop HDD.15 (ST4000DM000).
My Seagate Hard Disk failed in just a year
I myself had experience with Seagate hard drive that failed in just over a year. Since the failure happened within the replacement warranty period, I got a new one for free.
If you have any personal experience with hard disk failures, share them in the comments below.
