Hard Drive Reliability statistics from online backup company Backblaze

It's that time again.

With no more Seagate 3TB drives left to skew the results, it looks like the newest "worst" drive is a HGST 4TB, though the sample size was extremely low (< 80 drives), so that number doesn't have a very high confidence, especially since a related HGST 4TB model has a failure rate only 1/20th of that.

--Patrick
 
And of course as soon as I post the above, turns out BB has released new figures for Q1 2019, available here.

tl;dr: Seagate is improving, but they're still the worst.

--Patrick
 

Dave

Staff member
Every time I format a Seagate drive from now on I'm going to gloat in its face. "You like that, bitch?" I'm going to snarl. "You crash on me and I'm going to do the same to your friends!"

Of course, being a Seagate, it's got extra chromosomes and will probably still crash, but at least I'll get a moment's fun out of the deal.
 
Time to buy a new storage drive, and finding that many of the top selling internal drives on newegg have 15-20% one star reviews. Do unhappy customers tend to post about their bad experiences more than satisfied customers who just go along with the day and never leave a review?
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Time to buy a new storage drive, and finding that many of the top selling internal drives on newegg have 15-20% one star reviews. Do unhappy customers tend to post about their bad experiences more than satisfied customers who just go along with the day and never leave a review?
For platter drives, I'm still in the WD camp right now.

For SSDs, Samsung.
 
Backblaze has their newest list out, and they've started adding SSD reliability stats to the mix.

tl:dr; SSDs are, on average, ~10x more reliable than HDDs, AFR-wise. There still isn't as much aggregate history with SSDs as with HDDs, but the trend is pretty clear.

--Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Looks like WDC might be getting its act together again, though. Bout time.

That one seagate 14tb looks SO awful though.
 
That one seagate 14tb looks SO awful though.
From the article:
The Patient Is Stable: Last quarter, we reported on the state of our 14TB Seagate drives (model: ST14000NM0138) provisioned in Dell storage servers. They were failing at a higher than expected rate and everyone—Backblaze, Seagate, and Dell—wanted to know why.
It looks like a firmware upgrade was released that cut the failure rate almost in half, but the investigation is ongoing.

--Patrick
 
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