Backblaze, a company that provides cloud-based backup, has compared which hard drives from their servers failed during duration of 2015 and claims that one particular brand is problematic much more than the others.
The results of this report are interesting, mainly because Backblaze uses off-the-shelf hard drives for its servers, not business-grade data storage equipment.
The company claims that during 2015, it used 56.224 HDDs mounted on 1.249 storage pods, already having 39.690 hard drives at the beginning of the year.
Its hard drives range from 1TB to 8TB, and the company says it only sources from four hard drive manufacturers. From HGST companies (ex Hitachi Global enviroment Storage Technologies), Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital.
Backblaze notes in its report that hard drives tend to fail differently depending on brand, model, capacity, percentage of data filling. But the products of Western Digital failed almost twice as often as the second-place company.
According to 2015, Backblaze reports that Western Digital hard drives had an annual failure rate of almost 7%, followed by Seagate with almost 4%, third by Toshiba with almost 3,5%, and lastly HGST with a percentage failure just over 1%.
It is worth noting that the company's servers are mostly 4GB hard disk drives. For this class of hard disk drives, Toshiba was the first to fail, followed closely by Seagate, while Western Digital and HGST had better results. better.
You can find full details on the Backblaze website, which we think might be of interest to you if you are going to buy a new hard drive and you want to make your decision based on statistics instead of comments from various magazines.