What Are The Worst And Best Hard Drives? Backblaze Responds
New Report From Backblaze From HDD Statistics Shows That According To The Lifetime Tests, The Failure Rate Of Some Hard Drives Is Even Earlier Than Their Warranty!
According to experts, stay tuned to introduce the most reliable and worst hard drives.
Backblaze, specializing in analytics and cloud storage, recently published a report discussing the reliability of hundreds of thousands of hard drives in the company’s servers. This report, reliability, and failures experienced in different models of HDDcovers
Considering the on/off clock for any failed hard drives and failed boot drives, drives with raw specification data do not have SMART or drives with data outside the monitoring range; Backblaze has seen 17,155 failed hard drives since its inception. On average, the failed hard drives had an average operating time of only two years and six months.
This lifespan is less than the minimum legal warranty of 3 years in Europe.
The company grouped the failed hard drives into 30 models, excluding those with less than 50 failures, so outliers do not skew the results. Here are the models (from 4TB to 16TB) in a table:
The table gives us interesting information. For the first time, we see that Seagate is the king of hard drive failures. Seagate ST12000NM0007 models 12 terabytes have seen 2,023 failures, the highest average failure rate(AFR) with 7.46%, and an average life of only one year and six months.
The second model among the worst drives in the statisticsBackblaze is another hard drive, Seagate; 14 TB driveST1400NM0138 has an average failure rate of 6.23%. The third place goes to the HUH728080ALE604 4 TB hard drive from the HGST brand belongs to.
ResultsBackblaze can be interpreted to mean that Larger HDDs are less likely to fail than smaller ones, but there are several pitfalls here. First, Backblaze notes that all of its “small capacity” hard drives that were supposed to fail had already failed.
This company no longer uses 1, 1.5, 2, 3, or even 5 TB hard drives; All failures in those models are already factored into the company’s statistics.
According to the obtained information, it can be seen that Seagate is the leader, and the average failure rate of its hard drives is 2.28%, while it has shown the lowest moderate failure with its result of 0.31%. Of course, remember that even Seagate’s high failure rate in this test means that out of every hundred rugged drives used HDD, only 2.3 will be out of the cycle before the warranty expires; Therefore, the declared numbers are small anyway.
