The most reliable hard drives in the world

Cloud backup provider Backblaze has released its hard drive reliability statistics for 2020.

The company compiled the report from data on the active hard drives used in its daily operations – including Seagate, Toshiba, and HGST.

Reliability was measured as an annualised failure rate, calculated using the number of drive failures relative to the number of active drive days for each disk.

Backblaze recorded the number of failures for each hard drive from 1 January to 31 December 2020, extrapolating an annualised failure rate based on the number of days each drive was active.

The company tested a total of 162,299 hard throughout 2020, equating to a total of 51,267,791 days worth of hard drive operation across all products.

Backblaze noted that the annualised failure rate for drives with less than 250,000 drive days is not reflective of their performance due to the lack of data.

These drives are included in its report for completeless only.

“The Annualised Failure Rate (AFR) for 2020 dropped below 1% down to 0.93%,” Backblaze said.

“In 2019, it stood at 1.89%. That’s over a 50% drop year over year.”

The company attributed this improvement to the better performance of older drives and the addition of over 30,000 larger drives with better reliability in its environment.

“In other words, whether a drive was old or new, or big or small, they performed well in our environment in 2020,” Backblaze said.

2020 hard drive failure rates

The most reliable hard drives for 2020 are listed below, along with their annualised failure rates calculated from their performance during the quarter.

Lifetime failure rates

The table below shows the reliability of hard drive models Backblaze had in service as of 31 December 2020.

The reporting period is from 1 April 2013 through 31 December 2020.

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