Blackblaze is actually known for their online backup service, but since the company needs thousands of hardware to do their daily business, they decided to investigate reliability of 1.5 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB hard drives from Hitachi, Western Digital and Seagate.

Blackblaze have analyzed no less than 12765 hard drives from Seagate, 12956 drives from Hitachi and 2838 spindles from Western Digital. Since there were no predifined test scenarios defined, these results have to be taken with a grain of salt, but they do provide an a general impression on reliability of hard drives under tough conditions.

A closer look at the numbers reveals, that 10 percent of all Seagate hard drives died during the first year and there were 73.5 percent of the drives up and running after three years. In case of Western Digital 94.8 percent of all drives survived the first three monts and in case of Hitachi only 2 percent of all drives died during the first year and after two years there were still 96.9 percent of all initial drives alive. If you want to get more details on these results, we recommend the following blog.

In our opinion it is rather interesting to see that up to 10 percent of all hard drives can die during the first year. As we already mentioned these results have to be taken with a grain of salt, but the number are still impressive.




Source: Le Comptoir du Hardware