In 2020, Backblaze added 39,792 hard drives to their credit, and as of December 31, they had a total of 165,530 hard drives running on their servers. Of these, 3,000 disks were system drives while 162,530 were mass data storage drives. As you will see below, they use hard drives from different manufacturers and different capacities, so without a doubt we can get a very good idea of how reliable different brands are with this statistic.
The most reliable hard drives of 2020
At the end of 2020, Backblaze was monitoring 162,530 hard drives, those used for mass data storage. Of this amount, 231 drives that were used only for testing and models that did not have at least 60 drives are removed (they consider that with fewer drives the statistics are unreliable). That leaves us with a total of 162,299 records in this statistic.
For disks that have less than 250,000 disk days, no conclusion is warranted about their failure rate; There isn’t enough data over a one-year period to draw any conclusions, so we’ll then analyze the data from readers with over 250,000 driving days.
We need hard drives Seagate 6 TB (ST6000DX000) tops the list of most reliable hard drives with an annual failure rate (AFR) of just 0.23%, on top of that this model is the oldest in average age of all the units listed. Closely followed are 4 TB HGST (HMS5C4040ALE640) with an annual failure rate of 0.27%, 8 TB (HUH728080ALE600) with 0.29% and 12 TB (HUH721212ALE600) with a failure of 0.31% .
The average annual failure rate is 0.93%, so these models we have seen before are well below average, although it is true that the units Seagate 18TB significantly increased this ratio with a failure rate of 12.54%, as hard drives were less reliable. It is curious that Seagate is positioned as the most reliable brand but also the least reliable depending on the model, but what is not in doubt is that HGST it still has many of the most reliable hard drives on the market, as in previous years when it was also the leader.
For the home environment, which hard drive to buy?
As consumers, as a general rule, we will not opt for hard drives larger than 12TB because their price is still too high to be considered “consumer” devices. Overall, it seems like the most reliable hard drives we have right now are the Seagate 6TB, followed by the 4TB and 8TB HGST, so if we’re guided by this statistic which tells us which hard drives fail the least, do not hesitate and buy one of these units.
Now, if you are looking for 10TB or larger drives, you should go for the 12TB HGSTs because with a failure rate of just 0.31% they are the least likely to fail you during use. However, it’s worth noting Toshiba 14TB drives which, according to this statistic, have a failure rate of 0.91%.
