Cloud storage company Blackblaze has recently released a public report on the hard drive failure rate statistics of their currently running hard drives. Their drives, of course, come from all 3 manufacturers Seagate, Toshiba and WD(HGST).

Below you can find the chart for illustrative purposes:

While a little bland on its own, these statistics gives us crucial data on hard drives that has been running on a ‘live’ environment and is therefore more useful in terms of comparing the failure rates of the drives within that particular model.

As the trend model suggests, WD(HGST) is still leading at the top of the pack in terms of average failure rate with Seagate mostly far behind their competitor. Therefore, from an absolute reliability standpoint, it stands to say that WD is currently more value for the amount spent.

What is the point of this?

In terms of data, be it analogue or digital, nothing is absolute. These statistics are not only useful for companies that make these drives to identify faulty models in an effort to rectify them, they are also useful for us consumers as well.

If for example you are required to store some important data, perhaps choosing a long life span, low failure rate drive in a RAID 1 partition will decrease the likeliness of a drive failure wiping out all your important data.

You can view their previous quarterly results and findings here, which dates back all the way to 2013.

Via Wccftech

Chia is the horse-author from the far flung year of 2153. While not grazing on grass pastures or reviewing old time-y games and technology from the early 21st century pretending to not know what comes next (as to not disturb the space-time continuum), he can be seen exchanging vast quantities of Earth currency for parts needed to fix his damaged space ship.