This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Backblaze has released its reliability report for Q1 2022 covering cumulative failure rates both by specific model numbers and by manufacturer. The visitor noted that equally of this quarter, its 61,590 drives accept cumulatively spun for over one billion hours (that'southward 42 million days or 114,155 years, for those of you playing along at home).

Backblaze's reports on bulldoze lifespan and failure rates are a rare peek into hard drive longevity and lifespan. One of the almost mutual questions from readers is which hard drives are the most reliable. It'due south also one of the well-nigh difficult to reply. Companies exercise not release failure information and the handful of studies on the topic typically cloak vendor names and model numbers. As always, I recommend taking this data with a grain of salt: Backblaze uses consumer drives in a demanding enterprise environment and while the company has refined its storage pod design to minimize drive vibration, the boilerplate Backblaze hard drive does far more work in a day than a consumer HDD sitting in an external chassis.

For those of you wondering if bulldoze vibration really matters, hither'due south a video of someone stopping a bulldoze array by yelling at it.

Here's Backblaze'due south hard drive failure stats through Q1 2022:

blog-table-q1-2016-only

The discrepancy betwixt the 61,590 drives Backblaze deploys and the 61,523 drives listed in this chart is that the company doesn't show data unless it has at to the lowest degree 45 drives. That seems an acceptable threshold given the relatively small-scale gap. Backblaze also notes that the 8.63% failure charge per unit on the Toshiba 3TB is misleadingly high — the visitor has merely 45 of those drives, and one of them happened to fail.

Here'due south the same data broken downwards by manufacturer. This chart combines all drive data, regardless of size, for the past three years.

Drive stats

HGST is the clear leader here, with an annual failure rate of simply 1% for three years running. Seagate comes out the worst, though we suspect much of that rating was warped by the visitor's crash-happy 3TB bulldoze. Backblaze prominently pulled the 3TB drives from service simply over a year ago, and Seagate's bulldoze failure rate brutal precipitously as a issue. Western Digital now holds that dubious honor, though the company'south ratings take also improved in the past twelvemonth.

Asked why information technology sources the vast bulk of its drives from HGST or Seagate, Backblaze reported that information technology has little pick:

These days we demand to purchase drives in reasonably big quantities, v,000 to 10,000 at a time. We do this to proceed the unit cost downward and then we can reliably forecast our drive cost into the futurity. For Toshiba we have non been able to find their drives in sufficient quantities at a reasonable price. For WDC, we sometimes get offered a good price for the quantities we need, but before the deal gets done something goes sideways and the deal doesn't happen. This has happened to us multiple times, every bit recently as last month. We would be happy to purchase more drives from Toshiba and WDC, if we could, until then we'll go on to buy our drives from Seagate and HGST.

The company notes that 4TB drives continue to be the sweetness spot for building out its storage pods, but that information technology might move to half-dozen, 8, or 10TB drives every bit the price on the hardware comes down. Overall it'southward an interesting look at a topic nosotros rarely get to explore.

Now read: Who makes the most reliable hard drives?