“A year ago we got some insight into hard disk reliability when cloud backup provider Backblaze published its findings for the tens of thousands of disks that it operated,” Peter Bright reports for Ars Technica. “Backblaze uses regular consumer-grade disks in its storage because of the cheaper cost and good-enough reliability, but it also discovered that some kinds of disks fared extremely poorly when used 24/7.”
“A year later the company has collected even more data and drawn out even more differences between the different disks it uses,” Bright reports. “For a second year, the standout reliability leader was HGST. Now a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, HGST inherited the technology and designs from Hitachi (which itself bought IBM’s hard disk division). Across a range of models from 2 to 4 terabytes, the HGST models showed low failure rates… At the opposite end of the spectrum are Seagate disks.”
Much more in the full article here.