Backblaze, a cloud backup provider, recently completed a series of reliability tests on consumer hard drives from Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi. The big winner was Hitachi, with Seagate drives lagging notably in a distant third place. Having recently replaced two failing Seagate drives in a client’s PC (while a third drive – a Hitachi – continued operating just fine), my own limited observations would seem to confirm Backblaze’s findings.