Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2018/11/07/backblaze-releases-q3-2018-hard-drive-reliability-numbers/
Online backup service Backblaze has released its latest hard drive reliability statistics, showing excellent reliability for new high-capacity drives. If you’re looking for a new drive, you’d do well to buy the drives that have worked well for Backblaze.
The TidBITS article says, “Notably, the Seagate 8 TB and 12 TB drives are showing failure rates around 1%.” This is useful information, but it might give a misleading impression of the reliability figures relative to other manufacturers. The five HGST models in the chart have failure rates of 0.0, 0.0, 0.27, 0.34, and 0.38%. While most of these have a much smaller sample size than the two Seagate models that you highlighted, the HGST 4TB model with the 0.27% failure rate has the third highest number of drive days of all those in the chart. The Seagate 4TB model, with a similar number of drive days, has a 2.28% failure rate.
Over the years, HGST has had an average failure rate below that of Seagate in the Backblaze statistics. I have no connection with HGST nor with Backblaze, except as a satisfied customer.
Like all our ExtraBITS, our goal is for readers to go read the original post—we’re just summarizing and calling out enticing bits.
The HGST failure rates are indeed very good, but with much smaller sample sizes, it’s hard to draw a specific conclusion.
Id love to attach two of these 12TB drives onto my Mac mini… what are the favoured enclosures these days?
I generally use OWC enclosures, but don’t have much to compare against because of that.