BackBlaze is an online data storage company that made headlines with their reports of hard drive failure rates at the end of 2013. They have now released a new study which examines hard drive failure rates in their data center for 2014.
BackBlaze increased the total number of hard drives in their company, up to 41,213 from the previous total of 27,134. Most of the new drives are 4 and 6tb capacity. The drives are organized in groups of 45 within the data center, and only those drives where they have at least 45 to examine were included in this review.
The performance results were both surprising and predictable, depending on which hard drive you focus your attention. The 1.5tb Seagate drives continued their poor reliability showing, which was predictable considering their failure rate in the previous BackBlaze report. But another Seagate drive shows very bad results this time, the 3tb Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (ST3000DM001), which has an annual failure rate of over 43%.
On the other hand, BackBlaze was impressed so far with the performance of all of their 4tb drives. These came from HGST and Seagate, but they didn't include any Western Digital 4tb drives simply because they were consistently overpriced. The 6tb drives are still too new to their systems to make any final conclusions regarding their durability.
You can read more on the story at BackBlaze.
Their chart shows results from 17 different consumer level drives, and is worth a look.
