They tested these Seagate drives in one Storage Pod in their environment and they were not a good fit. For example, the 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda Green drive has a failure rate of 130.9%, but that is based on only 51 drives. Always consider the number of drives (Max # in Service) when looking at the failure rate.Yet, these two drive sizes have very different failure rates.

Nearly all of the 2TB and 3TB drives were installed in 2.0 chassis.

Yet, these two sizes have very different failure rates.

Nearly all of the 1TB and 1.5TB drives were installed in Storage Pod 1.0 chassis.

Still the WD 1TB drives have performed well for a long time. This makes sense given the “bathtub” curve of drive failure where drives over 4 years start to fail at a higher rate. It wasn’t until 2015 that the failure rate rose above the annual average for all drives. There are several drives with nearly 7 years of service. The Western Digital 1TB drives in use are nearly 6 years old on average.

they have calculated that the average failure rate for all periods for all drives is 4.81%. In the chart above are the failure stats for all of the drives in the review, broken down by year.But lets look at some observations based on the data. From that spreadsheet you can study the data and extract the data to suit you. They have also included “Average Drive Age” for each model and summarise the data by manufacturer size as well.Īt the bottom of this article is the data in a table which you can study at your leisure or if the table has too much to take in all at once, you can download a ZIP file that when unzipped contains a Microsoft Excel file of the data from the chart. They are publishing data on their 1TB drives for the first time. Backblaze, on the other hand, are in the person and business backup business and so they have data centre full of hard drives and they keep statistics on when a drive fails, and they have chosen to publish this data.Īs of the end of Q3 2015, there were 49,056 hard drives spread across 26 different models, varying from 1.0TB to 8.0TB in size, excluding boot drives, drive models with less than 45 drives and drives in testing systems. We often get asked which hard drives are the most reliable, but it is hard to give a valid answer because most of us only have a handful of drives and so our experiences, although important to us are not statistically sound.

Backblaze review