Backblaze Reveal Hard Drive Failure Rates

Backblaze Confirm Hard Drive Failures

If you’re looking to purchase a large capacity hard drive, then you’re very likely going to want to store a lot of data on it. As such, ensuring that it provides both good performance and exceptional levels of reliability is a must.

When it comes to these factors, there are few people who will know this better than companies who provide cloud data storage. Following a quarterly update, Backblaze has released their figures showing which hard drives have been good and others not so great.

Lots Of Drives With Different Jobs

With over 100,000 hard drives running, Backblaze clearly have different ones assigned to different jobs. Of the figures released, while Hitachi saw the single biggest failure rate in one of their models, Seagate saw the most consistent failures.

Now, admittedly, they are the biggest single supplier on the list, as a percentage failure rate, however, with their single most popular model showing 180 failures, it’s clearly quite a significant sum.

Smaller Capacities Perform Better?

One of the main key highlights of the list is that smaller capacity drives appear to survive better. At least, when directly compared to the larger capacities. Admittedly, for a cloud storage company, higher storage drives are a lot more cost effective. Clearly though, not if that comes with a significant failure rate.

With Backblaze currently undergoing a transitional change, however, they do expect figures (in regards to the manufacturers) to be more positive in the future.

What do you think? Have you ever had a hard drive fail? If so, which model? – Let us know in the comments!