The most reliable hard drives in the world

Cloud backup solutions provider Backblaze has released its hard drive reliability statistics for the third quarter of 2018.

Backblaze compared hard drives used in its operations – from Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, and HGST – for the report.

Reliability is measured as an annualised failure rate, calculated using the number of drive failures relative to the number of drives.

Backblaze then recorded the failure rates of its hard drives from 1 July to 30 September 2018, along with the annualised failure rate.

The backup provider has removed the last of its 3TB drives as it begins to focus more on its high-capacity 12TB drives, it added.

This has resulted in the company having 584 fewer drives than the previous quarter while adding over 40 petabytes of capacity.

Backblaze actively monitored 97,600 drives throughout Q3 2018, removing models without at least 45 drives present from the data.

Drives used for testing purposes were also removed from the data set. The results of its report are detailed below.

Q3 2018 Failure Rates

Lifetime Failure Rates

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