So what hard drive should I buy? Tell me, tell me! Beach does acknowledge this fact, but doesn’t see any reason to believe that their enterprise drives will become more reliable in the next three years or to the end of their warranty period. Moreover, Backblaze has only run the enterprise drives for two years, compared to the more than four years of mileage on their consumer disks. Meaning that if only two more enterprise drives had survived, then their analysis would have shown data centre drives to be more reliable than consumer drives. The difference between a 4.2 per cent and 4.6 per cent annual failure rates on 368 drive-years worth of service is only 1.5 spindles. This is a damned small sample on the data centre drive side of the equation. Overall, the enterprise drives had 17 (4.6 per cent) failures while the consumer drives bricked 613 times (4.2 per cent).

The problem is that it is comparing 14,719 drive-years of service on its consumer disks vs only 368 drive-years of service on data centre-grade drives. To compute annual failure rates, Backblaze compares failures per 'drive-years of service', which is the number of each type of drive they have multiplied by years of service – simple, eh? Take the data centre vs consumer drive failure rate statistic, for example. Yikes! We should stay away from Seagate, then, right? AnalysisĪ bit of digging into the firm's analysis reveals that the foundations underlying the Backblaze conclusions aren’t all that sturdy.

The results were pretty stark, with an “Annual Failure Rate” chart that showed Hitachi drives at less than 2 per cent WD spinners at around 3 per cent and Seagate drives at an astounding 14 per cent for the 1.5TB flavour, ~9 per cent for 3TB, and a high 3.8 per cent or so for the 4GB version. The bottom line, according to Beach, is that consumer drives are a better choice (even after factoring in the longer enterprise warranty) due to their higher reliability and lower cost.Įven more contentious is the last blog, which showed Backblaze failure rates by drive manufacturer.

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