Ars Technica recently reported on hard drive performance data collected by cloud backup service provider Backblaze.

Backblaze uses regular consumer-grade hard drives due to their low cost and adequate reliability. Since their hard drives are running and active constantly, Backblaze carefully monitors drive reliability. As a public service, the results are published yearly.

In this year’s performance results, the reliability winner is once again HGST. Now part of Western Digital, HGST was formerly Hitachi, and before that IBM’s hard drive division.

What really stands out in this year’s report is the failure rates of Seagate drives, which were as high as 43% for some models.

In the shifting world of hard drive reliability, it’s difficult to make realistic recommendations. But if you’re building a system that you plan to leave running 24/7, you might want to consider avoiding Seagate drives, at least for the next few months. Seagate will probably react to these numbers and improve reliability for their consumer grade drives.