14 DAY TRIAL // Backblaze, a company that provides cloud-based backup solutions, has studied how its data center's hard drives failed during the past year and claims that one particular brand fails more than the others.
The result of this report may interest you more than any other, mainly because Backblaze uses off-the-shelf hard drives for its data centers, not business-grade data storage equipment.
The company claims that during 2015, it used 56,224 HDDs organized in 1,249 storage pods, growing from 39,690 HDDs which it had at the start of year.
Hard drives varied from 1TB to 8TB storage, and the company says it only used four hard drive manufacturers, which were HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital.
While Backblaze observed in its report that hard drives tend to fail differently depending on their make, model, and capacity, aggregating the data, one company's products failed almost twice as often as the second-placed competitor.
Western Digital hard drives had the biggest failure rate
According to 2015's data, Backblaze says that Western Digital hard drives had an annual failure rate of nearly 7%, followed by Seagate with almost 4%, Toshiba with nearly 3.5%, and HGST with a failure rate of just over 1%.
It's worth noting that the company's data center used 4TB hard drives in most of its storage pods. For this category of hard drives Toshiba drives failed the most, followed at a tiny distance by Seagate, while Western Digital and HGST fared better.
You can find the full data on Backblaze's website, just in case you might be looking into buying a new hard drive in the coming year, and want to base your purchase decision on raw statistics instead of Amazon reviews.
Backblaze is the company which discovered that a recent Adobe Creative Cloud update was deleting the first folder in alphabetical order on the root drives for Mac OS X computers. Adobe eventually fixed the issue.
