THE MOST RELIABLE HARD DRIVES

Hard drive failures are part of any modern business, and this can cost a company dearly in terms of lost data and service disruptions. Suitable backup systems, data recovery solutions, and redundancy can help to limit the damage hard drive failures can cause, but it is still a headache for any tech department to deal with a drive which has died.

Hard drive failure is typically caused by mechanical problems, printed circuit board errors, and out-ofdate, corrupt, or buggy firmware. One of the best ways to prevent these problems – apart from the usual interventions like ensuring uninterrupted and quality power – is to buy the most reliable hard drives available.

To help companies and IT professionals with the decision on which hard drives to buy, backup and storage specialists Backblaze has recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in its data centers since April 2013. These statistics include the failure rate for over 70,000 hard drives which it monitors.

The failure rate, as it is used by Backblaze, may be more accurately described as the annualised failure rate. This percentage is calculated by dividing the number of drive failures per model by the number of these drives in use. It also takes the number of days a drive has been used into account to ensure that all drives are measured equally, independent of when the drives became active.

Backblaze’s 2016 statistics showed that there were two models which went through the whole year without any failures - the 4TB Toshiba and the 8TB HGST hard drives. The overall hard drive failure rate for 2016 was 1.95%, which was down from 2.47% in 2015 and well below the 6.39% failure rate for 2014.

The Backblaze statistics further showed that HGST produced the most reliable hard drives, with a failure rate of 0.60%. Toshiba was ranked second with a failure rate of 1.27%, followed by Seagate on 2.65% and WDC on 3.88%.

The company further found that larger hard drives had a lower failure rate, with the exception of 3TB drives - which had the lowest failure rate at 1.40%. The set of 8TB hard drives had an average failure rate of 1.60%, significantly lower than 5TB and 4TB drives with failure rates of 2.22% and 2.06% respectively. ■