Cloud backup provider Backblaze has released its hard drive reliability statistics for the first quarter of 2019.
The company compared active hard drives used in its operations from Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, and HGST to compile the report.
Reliability was measured as an annualised failure rate, calculated using the number of drive failures relative to the number of active drive days for each disk.
Backblaze recorded the number of failures for each hard drive from 1 January to 31 March 2019, extrapolating the annualised failure rate from this data.
It was using 104,325 hard drives to store data at the end of Q1 2019, although it removed from consideration drives that were used for testing purposes and models for which it did not have at least 45 drives.
Backblaze noted that while the total number of drives in service decreased by 648 since the end of last year, the backup provider added almost 60 petabytes of storage.
This can be attributed to the migration from smaller drives to larger drive sizes.
Backblaze predicts that it will have fewer than 15,000 4TB drives by the end of 2019 while increasing its available cloud storage capacity to over 1 exabyte.
Q1 2019 Failure Rates
The most reliable hard drives for Q1 2019, as well as their lifetime failure rates from 20 April 2013 to 31 March 2019, are listed below.
| Model | Drive Count | Drive Days | Drive Failures | Annualized Failure Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4TB Hard Drives | ||||
| Toshiba MD04ABA400V | 99 | 12,662 | 0 | 0.00% |
| HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 | 2,557 | 313,383 | 2 | 0.23% |
| HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 | 12,753 | 1,172,824 | 11 | 0.34% |
| Seagate ST4000DM000 | 19,785 | 1,989,429 | 107 | 1.96% |
| 5TB Hard Drives | ||||
| Toshiba MD04ABA500V | 45 | 4,050 | 0 | 0.00% |
| 6TB Hard Drives | ||||
| Seagate ST6000DX000 | 1,023 | 135,832 | 1 | 0.27% |
| WD WD60EFRX | 89 | 30,523 | 1 | 1.20% |
| 8TB Hard Drives | ||||
| HGST HUH728080ALE600 | 1,001 | 93,598 | 3 | 1.17% |
| Seagate ST8000DM002 | 9,874 | 888,741 | 29 | 1.19% |
| Seagate ST8000NM0055 | 14,381 | 1,294,451 | 58 | 1.64% |
| 10TB Hard Drives | ||||
| Seagate ST10000NM0086 | 1,203 | 108,555 | 3 | 1.01% |
| 12TB Hard Drives | ||||
| HGST HUH721212ALN604 | 4,872 | 259,749 | 4 | 0.56% |
| Seagate ST12000NM0007 | 34,708 | 2,955,025 | 180 | 2.22% |
| HGST HUH721212ALE600 | 520 | 14,040 | 1 | 2.60% |
| 14TB Hard Drives | ||||
| Toshiba MG07ACA14TA | 1,220 | 109,404 | 1 | 0.33% |
Lifetime Failure Rates
| Model | Drive Count | Failure Rate | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4TB Hard Drives | ||||
| HGST HMS5C4040BLE640 | 12,753 | 0.45% | ||
| HGST HMS5C4040ALE640 | 2,557 | 0.52% | ||
| Toshiba MD04ABA400V | 99 | 0.88% | ||
| Seagate ST4000DM000 | 19,785 | 2.74% | ||
| 5TB Hard Drives | ||||
| Toshiba MD04ABA500V | 45 | 1.09% | ||
| 6TB Hard Drives | ||||
| Seagate ST6000DX000 | 1,023 | 1.03% | ||
| WD WD60EFRX | 89 | 3.84% | ||
| 8TB Hard Drives | ||||
| HGST HUH728080ALE600 | 1,001 | 0.84% | ||
| Seagate ST8000NM0055 | 14,381 | 1.08% | ||
| Seagate ST8000DM002 | 9,874 | 1.03% | ||
| 10TB Hard Drives | ||||
| Seagate ST10000NM0086 | 1,203 | 0.97% | ||
| 12TB Hard Drives | ||||
| HGST HUH721212ALN604 | 4,872 | 0.55% | ||
| Seagate ST12000NM0007 | 34,708 | 1.65% | ||
| 14TB Hard Drives | ||||
| Toshiba MG07ACA14TA | 1,220 | 1.17% | ||
