Backblaze highlights most reliable hard drive models

Cloud backup and storage service provider Backblaze has published its hard drive stats for Q2 2016, and it makes interesting reading.

The company now has more than 250 petabytes of data stored on more than 68,000 hard drives.

The highest annualized failure rate -- calculated as ((Failures)/(Drive Days/365)) * 100 -- was the Seagate ST4000DX000 4TB drive, which had an annualized failure rate of 19.81 percent. Next up was the Toshiba MD04ABA500V 5TB, with an annualized failure rate of 8.91 percent.

Backblaze is also ramping up migration to 8TB hard drives, and has now deployed more than 2,700 Seagate models. The company has migrated around 6.5 petabytes of data from 2TB HGST hard drives to the Seagate 8TB drives.

The Backblaze data isn't the final word on hard drives since the company is open about the fact that it doesn't use many Toshiba and Western Digital hard drives, while more than half of its drives are from Seagate (with 50.4 percent being the ST4000DM00 4TB model, accounting for more than 34,000 units).

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