[NewsPoster]

Backup purveyor Backblaze has released the latest iteration of its annual consumer-grade hard drive failure report. While the small-capacity Seagate models and most Western Digital hard drives are still seeing high failure rates over time, newer drives from all manufacturers that have a large enough data sample for reliable interpretation are showing a marked improvement over previous generations of drives. HGST remains the clear leader in drive reliability in Backblaze's data center, however.

By the end of 2015, the Backblaze datacenter had 56,224 spinning hard drives containing customer data. These hard drives reside in 1,249 Backblaze Storage Pods. By comparison, 2015 began with 39,690 drives running in 882 Storage Pods.

Overall, the hierarchy of companies compared by rates of failure in the data center are essentially unchanged, according to today's report. HGST is most reliable, at just over one percent of failures cumulative since April 2013, followed by Toshiba (with a relatively low sample size compared to the other vendors), and Seagate. Western Digital pulls up the rear, approaching seven percent -- almost double that of Seagate's failure rate.

The notably bad family of drives from the previous reports, the Seagate ST3000DM001, have all been retired. Through the end of the evaluation period, 28.3 percent of the drive failed over three years. In the same time period, two HGST models failed at 0.8 percent, and 1.8 percent respectively, with 3.8 percent of the Toshiba DT01ACA300 drives dying, and 7.3 percent of the WDC WD30EFRX model failing.

The company added a fair amount more 6TB drives to the arrays in 2015, with a total of 2,400 drives spread across two manufacturers. Of 1,882 Seagate drives, 1.9 percent of them have failed. In a population of 458 WD drives, 7.01 percent have failed.

The company maintains a very large inventory of 4TB drives, and the numbers are closer than previous for failure rates. HGST still maintains a significant lead at less than one percent, with WD second at just over two percent. Seagate and Toshiba drives are effectively in a dead head at around a three percent failure rate between April 2013 and December 2015.

While the company is providing data on some newer drives, such as the 5GB Toshiba model, and the 8TB HGST He8 helium-filled drives, the sample size remains small. Of a population of 45 of each model, one 5TB Toshiba drive has failed, and two of the He8 drives have stopped working. The company warns that it is too early to determine any trends, given the small amount of installed drives.

Previous reports by Backblaze were criticized for the "abnormal" temperature and vibrational stresses put on a drive in the data center. However, given the design of the Backblaze array and facility itself, drive temperatures are likely cooler than those in a PC or in a multi-drive consumer enclosure. Regardless, even if drives fail quicker under the strain, the numbers should be proportional to each other, given that each drive is in the same environment for the duration of the testing period.

[panjandrum]

This is great news. I've historically avoided WD drives for a number of reasons (un-removable partitions on external drives, extremely slow external-drive performance, etc.) Looks like maybe it is safe to go back to Seagate again now, as long as we make sure not to purchase an older model.

[DiabloConQueso]

In all fairness, WD makes a wide range of drives that experience very different failure rates. It looks like Backblaze is using the "Red" line of drives, which are not of the highest quality.

It would be interesting to see how well the RE4, RE, and Se line of WD drives fare, as those are higher-quality, enterprise-level drives that are much different than the Red line of drives.

We've been using RE4 and RE drives for almost a decade now (over 25+ drives) and have a failure rate on them hovering at about 4%.

I choose to read this report as being specific to the Red line, not Western Digital drives on the whole.

[Mike Wuerthele]

DCQ, you are correct. This is just consumer-level (red) drives. Backblaze doesn't use NAS or Enterprise drives.

[DiabloConQueso]

It would also be interesting to see the Green line of WD drives as well, as in my anecdotal experience, the failure rate is over 50% across 5 years (especially those included in WD-supplied enclosures, like the older Elements drives that contained WD Green drives inside -- 3 out of 5 of my external 1TB Elements enclosures that shipped with Green drives are now dead as a doornail, all failing in the exact, same way).