Let’s face it. As gamers, hard drives are the key to our survival. Ok, not quite to that extreme but equipment reliability is something that should be on everyone’s mind when choosing equipment for that new gaming tower, HTPC, or console. Many of us have been there when an old disc drive starts to click and whine, and as all of us know the repercussions can be devastating. So which brands are reliable and which fall short?
Backblaze is one of the main names in online data backup so it’s safe to say they use a few hard drives, over 25,000 drives in fact. Yesterday the company released information detailing which hard drives they use and their reliability. The most unreliable of the stack is Seagate, with the Barracuda Green writing the largest annual failure rate at 120%.
Backblaze also uses many Hitachi and Western Digital hard drives in their data center and those have shown a much lower failure rate than their Seagate cousins. Toshiba and Samsung were mentioned as well but there isn’t enough data for viable statistics on those brands. But the early numbers for each of these brands are very promising.
Backblaze goes into full detail; listing each drives’ average age, annual failure rate and more. You can get the full breakdown on their blog.
