Hitachi hard drives are the most reliable, says BackBlaze

By Konrad Krawczyk January 21, 2014

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We all know that there are certain inevitabilities in life. These include, death, taxes, the Yankees having a bloated payroll, and of course, hard drive failure. However, when it comes to staying intact and running for long lengths of time without incidents or hiccups, some hard drives are better than others at maintaining longevity.

BackBlaze, which provides online backup services, conducted a study about physical hard drives and longevity, essentially testing out which hard drives will run the longest under harsh conditions.

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BackBlaze tested nearly 13,000 Seagate drives, almost 13,000 Hitachi drives, roughly 3,000 Western Digital drives, 58 Toshiba drives and 18 Samsung hard drives. On average, the Seagate drives were 1.4 years of age, while the Hitachi drives were two years old on average. Western Digital’s drives were 2.5 years of age, while Samsung’s were the oldest; 3.7 years. Toshiba’s drives were the newest of the bunch; 0.7 years of age. In all, 27,134 drives were used in these tests by BackBlaze.

The storage capacities also varied among the brands used in these tests. The Hitachi drives were of the 2TB, 3TB and 4TB flavors. Seagate’s drives were of the 1.5TB, 3TB and 4TB varieties. The Western Digital drives used we either 1TB or 3TB setups.

So what did the findings conclude? Hitachi’s drives are actually the most reliable of them off, with an average failure rate of about 1 percent. Of Hitachi drives, BackBlaze said “If the price were right, we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives. They have been rock solid, and have had a remarkably low failure rate.”

The worst offenders were Seagate’s hard drives, across the board. The 1.5TB drives had an annual failure rate of close to 14 percent, while the 3TB and 4TB disks had failure rates of roughly 9 percent and 3 percent, respectively.

So there you have it. Want the most reliable drives on the market? Stay away from Seagate and invest in some Hitachi disks. Assuming these results are accurate, Hitachi seems to be the way to go.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments below.

Image credit: www.hitechreview.com

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