News STORAGE: Backblaze Releases Q2-2021 Hard Drive Reliability Report

Backblaze is a cloud service provider that uses hundreds of thousands of mechanical hard drives, and keeps detailed records on the failure rates of said drives. Backblaze then publishes a list of the drives they use, and their reliability.

There were three top performers with no drive losses at all .They are as follows:

1. Seagate 6TB ST600DX000 with 886 drives in use with an average age of 74.8 months.

2. HGST 12TB HUH721212ALE600 with 2,600 drives in use with an average age of 21 months.

3. Western Digital 16TB WUH721816ALE6LO with 624 drives in use with an average age of 3 months.

The worst performers were as follows:

1. Seagate 14TB ST14000NM0138 with 1,653 drives in use with an average age of 6.8 months (5.55% failure rate).

2. Toshiba 4TB MD04ABA400V with 98 drives in use with an average age of 73.3 months (4.07% failure rate).

3. Seagate 12TB ST12000NM0007 with 3,552 drives in use with an average age of 31.7 months (2.06% failure rate)

All other failure rates were below 2%.


Here is a link to the Backblaze website. There is an extensive chart of all the drives they use there.




Personal take: I use SSDs. Also Seagate is hit or miss.

 

[confusis]

Seagate has been hit or miss for a while, alas. I've stuck with WD for anything spinning rust in the recent times

 

[Revenant]

Seagate has been hit or miss for a while, alas. I've stuck with WD for anything spinning rust in the recent times

WD is my go-to as well. I only use spinners in my NAS these days though.