Backblaze: Four out of 10 Seagate 3TB drives fail

More than four in ten units of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 with a capacity of 3TB are sold by cloud provider Backblaze. Other Seagate hard drives and drives from other manufacturers show far fewer defects at the supplier.

Backblaze has 1,163 copies of Barracuda 7200.14 in its data centers, the data shows. The drives are on average less than 2.5 years old, but 43 percent of them showed defects. Only the Barracuda 7200.11 with 1.5TB also broke down a lot, in 23.5 percent of the cases.

The company previously reported problems with Seagate’s drives, but then the failure rate was around 15 percent. That has now risen to more than 40 percent. Because Backblaze has many drives in its data centers, numbers like Backblaze give an indication of the durability of the drives.

Backblaze has yet to say much about the performance of 6TB drives it has recently launched. For example, only a few of the Western Digital Red 6TB drives have failed, despite 270 in operation.