Latest hard drive reliability data from Backblaze

Cloud storage provider Backblaze publishes their hard drive reliability findings quarterly, thus providing a useful benchmark for us regular folks.

In their most recent report, Backblaze’s data includes 8 terabyte drives for the first time. Failure rates for the 8 TB drives is slightly higher than smaller drives, but this may be due to the fact that all of the 8 TB drives are new, and new drives tend to fail more often than drives that have been running for a while.

As usual, HGST (Hitachi) drives top the reliability charts, but Seagate is now close behind. Western Digital failure rates are the worst of all the drives analyzed.