Backblaze Ranks Hard Drive Vendor Reliability
Online backup company Backblaze has produced another report on hard drive reliability, this time looking at specific vendors and models. Overall, drives from Hitachi (now owned by Western Digital) came out on top, with a 96.9 percent survival rate after 36 months. Second was Western Digital, whose drives had a quick initial die-off, but then stabilized with an overall 94.8 percent survival rate. In a distant third place was Seagate with a 73.5 percent survival rate. In spite of that, Backblaze is now buying mostly 4 TB Seagate drives due to their low cost and steady performance; the company also likes the Western Digital 3 TB Red drives.