| Brand | # of drives | Terabytes | Avg age in years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate | 12,765 | 39,576 | 1.4 |
| Hitachi | 12,956 | 36,078 | 2.0 |
| Western Digital | 2,838 | 2,581 | 2.5 |
| Toshiba | 58 | 174 | 0.7 |
| Samsung | 18 | 18 | 3.7 |
Looks like Seagate hard drives are very unreliable with Western Digital and Hitachi performing fairly well. Hitachi Deskstars seem to be the most reliable (.9% annual failure rate).
Backblaze is an online backup company which is why they were able to test these drives.
Via [Backblaze]
I"m assuming that overall(and in average) SSDs will have a lower failure rate due to less moving parts
Another link at Hacker News where the Backblaze employees (& CTO) actually participated in the discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7095357
In-short, Backblaze guys are bargainers who buy absolutely the cheapest hard drives with best capacity / $$ regardless their reliability. For example they'll rather buy cheap WD Greens or Seagate Barracudas than spend a bit more for WD Reds or Seagate equivalent that are designed for 24x7 operations.
I have to agree that last gen Seagate drives are pretty bad for home NAS. So is WD Green although I do have a pair of WD Green 808GB in my NAS that are still going after 4 years. Recently bought a pair Seagate ST2000VN000 NAS drives and finger crossed that they will last me another 4 years.
Hitachi is priced that way. Lost 3 seagates in last 8 years. Will not recommend them.
It's strange that the WD Black is not included in the study.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-…
Quite the turnaround in the reputation of harddrives bearing the 'Deskstar' moniker…
Prior to Hitachi buying out their harddrive business about 10 years ago, IBM Deskstars earned the nickname of 'Deathstars'.
They caused many a business and home-office catastrophe, especially for people who also used them to backup data.
Lots of people then proceeded to discover that burned optical disc dyes were not all created equal…
Interestingly that WD acquired HGST back in 2012 — we'll see whether they'll bring back the "Deathstars".
dunno, my storage seagate drives are running ok
Device Model: SAMSUNG HD204UI
Serial Number: S2H7J90B736861
Firmware Version: 1AQ10001
User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes
no reallocated sectors
13,973 power on hours
2,078 power cycle count
Thanks for this. I have never been keen to trust other brands apart from Seagate/WD, and I've always considered someone's anecdotal evidence of drive reliability to be, well, unreliable. Seems like Backblaze had a good sample size, time frame, and also explained the caveats with their results. Looks like I'll be going the Deskstar 4TB for my next NAS.