Many of us know the pain of having a hard drive fail. These days, having a backup in case of redundancy is crucial, and so is finding reliable hard drives. But how do you choose a drive that’s least likely to have you reaching for that backup in the first place? Perhaps Backblaze’s hard drive stats can help. Since 2013, Backblaze – a computer backup and cloud storage provider – has published statistics and insights based on the hard drives in the company data center. By the end of 2020, Backblaze was monitoring 162,530 hard drives used to store data and they’ve listed 162,299 of them based on failure rates below: The good news is, the annualized failure rate has dropped by 50% since 2019, where it stood at 1.89% compared to 2020’s 0.93%. Most reliable hard drives from Toshiba, HGST, Western Digital Toshiba’s drives have been impressive, with a 14TB drive (model: MG07ACA14TA) and 16TB drive (model: MG08ACA16TEY) each delivering zeros for annualized failure rates (AFR) – though these drives had only been installed for two months by the time Backblaze’s 2020 stats were published. Only one Western Digital drive made it onto the report, the 14TB model WUH721414ALE6L4, however it’s important to say that HGST is a Western Digital brand, so they are under the same corporate umbrella – and HGST drives have consistently been outperforming Seagate drives over many years (and this year is no exception). Backblaze tested 6,0002 pieces of that WDC model and found that...
Published By: CineD - Monday, 3 May, 2021