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.

About jrivett

Jeff Rivett has worked with and written about computers since the early 1980s. His first computer was an Apple II+, built by his father and heavily customized. Jeff's writing appeared in Computist Magazine in the 1980s, and he created and sold a game utility (Ultimaker 2, reviewed in the December 1983 Washington Apple Pi Journal) to international markets during the same period. Proceeds from writing, software sales, and contract programming gigs paid his way through university, earning him a Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) degree at UWO. Jeff went on to work as a programmer, sysadmin, and manager in various industries. There's more on the About page, and on the Jeff Rivett Consulting site.

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