Backblaze: HGST drives are remarkably reliable

Backup service Backblaze has released the numbers of how many hard drives failed in its data centers in 2017. The company notes that hard drive reliability appears to have improved in recent years.

In the figures, which the company publishes every quarter, the company shows how many of which drives have failed and calculates an average annual failure rate based on this. Backblaze only takes drives of which they own more than 45 pieces.

During the fourth quarter, the most notable negative outliers are some Seagate 4TB drives. However, the company does not own many drives for most models, so that the outcome can be excessively negative due to a single failure.

The drives that are widely used and have failure rates above two percent are the Seagate ST12000NM0007 with a 2.01 percent failure rate, the Western Digital WD60EFRX, with a 3.66 percent failure rate, and the Seagate ST4000DM000, with a dropout rate of 2.89 percent.

Backblaze is positive about the drives from HGST, formerly Hitachi, whose 4TB models managed to maintain failure rates below 1 percent each year. That company’s 8TB model and Toshiba’s 5TB drive haven’t had a single dropout in the past year, though the company only has 45 units each.

The company completely switched to drives of 4TB or larger in 2017, preventing it from showing numbers from smaller drives. This was still the case in the past. Backblaze will be holding an online seminar on February 9 that takes a closer look at the numbers.