In a January 2014 blog post, cloud-based backup provider Backblaze says Hitachi and Western Digital drives have been the most reliable of the drives it has used so far.
Brian Beach, Distinguished Engineer, Backblaze, shared that the
annual failure rate of a Seagate 1.5TB drive was about 14% for its data
centre, against Hitachi's 2TB drives at roughly 1% and Western Digital
1TB drives, which had a failure rate of
3%. The company uses 3TB drives from all three storage manufacturers,
and Seagate had the highest failure rate at about 9%, followed by
Western Digital at around 3%, and Hitachi at around 1%. In the 4TB
space, Hitachi drives performed more reliably than Seagate drives, while
Western Digital 4TB drives were not used.
"If the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives.
They have been rock solid, and have had a remarkably low failure rate," he said in his post.
While
the choice may be easy to make on the face of these figures, Beach
further explains that older drives are generally failing more, and that
some of the Seagate drives which failed were replacements provided as
part of warranties, and possibly refurbished drives rather than
brand-new.
The comments for the article are a mixed bag, with no clear
support for any one brand and notes that batches of a particular model
can turn out 'bad'. Still, it is useful to note which models various users have warned against.
However
reliable the hard drive, it is always best to back data up somewhere,
whether on cloud storage through a service like Backblaze, manually onto
Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive, or onto a separate disk.
