Hard Drive Reliability: Which Brands to Buy. Which To Avoid.
The fine folks at Backblaze recently updated their hard drive brand reliability chart to reflect their latest findings. Managing cloud backups in a data center, they employ 34,881 drives and store over 100 petabytes of data. They have the goods on what works well and what doesn’t.
Their latest chart shows that Hitachi drives lead the pack in terms of reliability, with a low failure rate. Seagate 4TB and Western Digital 1.5TB drives also fare well. But Seagate and Western Digital 3TB drive failure rates are much higher than normal. You can dive deeper and read more about their study.
Personally speaking, I’ve had good luck with Samsung, Hitachi and Western Digital drives – but the largest drive capacity I own is 1TB. I’m currently shopping around for a new backup drive for my Macbook Pro, so the Backblaze study was particularly useful for me. Maybe it will be of use for you, too.
So, which drive brands do you use regularly? Which brands do you avoid? Let me know. Share your input in the comments below.
-Krishna
Drezz
September 24, 2014 at 12:34 pmI’ve owned all three brands, but at different times in my various configurations. I highly recommend HITACHIs. My old man uses a laptop with a HITACHI drive that is over 10 years old (2004 ! ). Still works as well as the day it was bought.
Matt Strieby
September 24, 2014 at 12:48 pmI have two WD 2TB drives in a RAID 1 set-up. Going on eight months and so far so good.
Timothy Warren
September 24, 2014 at 2:03 pmI stick with Seagate, because Western Digital drives fail very quickly for me, and I haven’t had Seagate drives fail on me until they are fairly old.
Then again, none of my drives are in the sizes represented in the sample here.