Backblaze Reveals Latest Hard Drive Life Expectancy Data

A dead hard drive can be a genuine disaster in the modern age. With capacities exceeding 20TB, that could mean a ton of lost data if you don’t have a good backup solution. Buying reliable hard drives from the start can mitigate the risk, but it’s difficult to know which drives are the most robust. Cloud storage provider Blackblaze keeps meticulous track of hard drive reliability, and it’s back with another round of analysis, calling out the most and least trustworthy drives.

Backblaze offers both business and personal backup solutions, which it claims is a truly “unlimited” service. With a promise like that, Backblaze goes through a lot of hard drives. The company’s engineers track hundreds of thousands of hard drives, using a technique called a Kaplan-Meier Curve to forecast the failure rate. This statistical model is most often used in biological sciences to predict survival rates, but it can be used equally well for hard drives.

Backblaze has provided data on 4, 8, 12, and 14TB hard drives. At the smallest tier, Backblaze compared an HGST (HMS5C4040BLE640) drive and a Seagate drive (ST4000DM000), and there’s a stark difference in failure rates. HGST (a division of Western Digital) charges a little more for the hardware, but 97 percent of these drives are still working after six years. It’s only 81 percent for the Seagate model. However, Backblaze notes that when factoring in the higher cost of HGST 4TB drives, it actually makes sense to use Seagate drives in a large-scale operation. If you’re just slapping a single drive in your PC, not so much.

Stepping up to 8TB, Backblaze tested a pair of Seagate drives, one consumer (ST8000DM002) and the other enterprise (ST8000NM0055). Surprisingly, the consumer drives had a 95 percent six-year survival rate, but the enterprise model was a little lower at 93.6 percent. There might be an argument for the enterprise drive as it has a longer warranty, and the failure rate is only a bit worse.

At 12TB, Backblaze compared an HGST drive and two Seagate models, and one of the Seagates (ST12000NM0008) exhibited a higher failure rate than the others. That said, all three were generally very reliable. After 24 months, the worse Seagate was still at 98 percent survival, while the other one and the HGST 12TB were over 99 percent.

The 14TB capacity is the largest Backblaze used, as well as the group with the shortest testing period. Backblaze notes that the early failure rate is now within the range of randomness, so there’s no longer a clear issue with early mortality in large, high-capacity drives. The Toshiba, Seagate, and Western Digital 14TB drives all maintained at least 99 percent survival after a year. The Seagate (ST14000NM001G) does appear to be trending lower, but the Toshiba drives began failing at a higher rate around two years. The difference is only one percent lower than projected after three years, though.

If you’re looking at smaller hard drives, Backblaze’s data suggests you should avoid Seagate. While Seagate does have higher failure rates across the board, the differences with 8TB and higher drives is on the order of just one or two percentage points. As long as you maintain good backups, price should be your primary concern.

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