The IT Nerd

If you’re wondering what the most reliable brand of hard drive to buy for your computer is, you don’t have a lot of places to look for that info. In the end, most of us rely on what the guy at the computer store says or what the search engine of your choice manages to find. BlackBlaze however has taken the liberty of posting the data on hard drive failures in their environment. They did this last year and it turned heads. So they’ve done it again. Here’s a link to the study and it does note the following:

• 4TB are the drive to buy from a reliability standpoint. 3TB, not so much.
• HGST and Seagate are the brands to buy at the moment. Western Digital, not so much… Though BackBlaze doesn’t have a lot of 4TB drives from Western Digital to form a real opinion.
• The jury is still out on 6TB drives.

The methodology of this study is sound, thus I would take the results as being valid. That’s going to really help me when I buy drives for the Network Attached Storage unit that I’m building. I’m sure it will help you as well.

Here’s another question that came out of my recent trip to the UK:

IT Nerd. You’ve made a very big deal of having to have your hard drive replaced multiple times. So, how did the hard drive that you bought work for you? I am assuming that it was fine as you didn’t go on a rant about it failing. But I figured that I ask. 

Thanks for the question. First, let me address the rant part. If you’ve gone through what I’ve gone through recently with recent run of bad luck with hard drives in my MacBook Pro, you’d rant too. It’s very frustrating if you rely on your computer like I do. Having said that, the Western Digital Black hard drive that I put in had no issues. Now I will admit that I did back up every night I was in the UK as I was expecting something bad to happen seeing as I was lugging my MacBook Pro through airports, subjecting it to security checkpoints, and using it in a variety of locations. But nothing bad happened. That seems to point towards Apple having a serious quality issue with the hard drives that they use. I will continue to monitor it and report back in less than 90 days about where things sit on this front.

If you’re shopping around for a hard drive, you care about its reliability because even though you religiously back up your data (you do back up don’t you?), you don’t want that drive to fail.

Enter Backblaze. They’re a loud backup company and they just posted information on drive failure rates that I think you’ll find very interesting. They currently have over 27,000 consumer grade drives in use at any given time that come from the following vendors:

• 12,000 drives from Seagate
• 12,000 drives from Hitachi
• 3,000 drives from Western Digital
• A small amount of drives from Toshiba and Samsung that don’t factor into this report because the number of drives in use is too small

Their study indicates the following:

• Hitachi has the lowest overall failure rate which is 3.1% over three years.
• Western Digital has a slightly higher failure rate which is 5.2%. These drives if they fail at all, fail early in their life.
• Seagate drives fail much more often at a rate of 26.5% and they tend to die by the three-year mark.

Backblaze buys drives the way you and I do which is they get the cheapest consumer-grade drives that will work for what they need them to do. Thus this is a handy report because it is a good predictor of the lifespan and quality of the drives that you buy. I for one will be recommending that my customers use Hitachi drives along with the Western Digital drives that I’ve been recommending for a few years now as clearly those drives have the best reliability.