Of the 132,339 hard drives connected to your system, 2,380 were system drivers (used to bind your servers), 129,959 disks in storage, which will be used in this calculation as system disks have a much lower usage rate than data disks. They also use SSDs to do caching, but in this case it doesn't count statistics because they wanted to see the reliability of the disks in traditional machines. Similarly, it is not considered which hard disk is slow or fast.
The most reliable quarterly records
At the end of the first quarter of this year, Backblaze had 129,959 hard drives running storage, but when they removed the test disks they used and models that had less than 60 units (think they must have at least 60 units on a single hard disk to calculate), there are a total of 129,764 driving machines used in the calculations.
According to these data, the annual failure rate is 1.07%, and according to the company the lowest it has had since 2013, and actually lower than they had at the same time last year (1), 56%).
The reason for this low rate is that over this three-month period, a total of four models from three different manufacturers had zero failures. No models Toshiba 4TB, 16TB Seagate and 8TB and 12TB HGST They failed, but if one Seagate 16TB model failed, as there were only 60 drivers, the annual failure rate would increase to 7.25%. Similarly, if Toshiba's 4TB failed, of which there are only 99 units, the rate would have risen to 4.05%.
Conversely, none of the 8 and 12 HGST Drives failed, and in this species there was actually an estimated value (1,000 and 1,560 respectively), so the annual rate was not significantly increased.
Highly reliable hard drives (total)
Those previous figures are very good for doing calculations in the short term, but ultimately the interesting data for us users is to know the reliability of hard drives in the long run, since no one bought a disk to keep it running for three months but all its useful life?
This is the details on Backblaze from April 1, 2013 to December 31, 2019, the most representative time to decide which drives are the most difficult.
Here we can see a more complete statistic and where we can produce attractive data, such as a hard drive with a very low failure rate (not counting the 16 newly used TB Seagate, with only 60 units and 5,036 days of use) and can therefore process The most reliable of all is 12TB HGST in its two forms (HUH721212ALE600 and HUH721212ALN604).
In fact, it often seems that the most difficult type of driver with the best reliability is HGST, given that its units have the lowest failure rate, on average and globally. On the contrary, according to this information the less reliable drive is the Seagate ST4000DM000 4 TB, followed by the 12 TB model (ST12000NM0007), although it is also true that it is compatible with disk models that contain most units in statistics.
In short, and if we have to focus on these statistics (which is the most reliable document we will find), the most reliable drivers are those of HGST, followed by those of Toshiba and leaving Seagate in last place.
