Disk drive reliability: What we've learned from a billion hours

[RV_]

I now use small 256GB SSDs for my computers and my tablets have 64gb and the Surface Pro 3 128GB SSDs. Good info article.

 

Excerpt:

 

"Disk drives may be down, but they're not out - we'll be using them for decades to come. The good folks at online backup service Backblaze have accumulated over 1,000,000,000 hours of drive reliability stats in the last three years. Here's what they've learned.

 

I've been a paying Backblaze customer for the last couple of years and a fan for even longer. The company has a relentless focus on easy-to-use software and unlimited backup storage. I use over 2TB of Backblaze storage for encrypted backup data.

 

This morning they've released their latest three years of disk drive data from over 60,000 drives. While much notebook primary storage is now SSD-based, hard drives remain a great way to backup data inexpensively.

 

Backblaze uses consumer hard drives almost exclusively, since more costly enterprise drives aren't more reliable. That's good for those of us, like me, who use multiple consumer hard drives for local backup.

 

The good news

Backblaze has seen steadily increasing drive reliability over the last three years. Here's their overall reliability by vendor: Chart in article

 

The bad news

While overall reliability is getting better, the newer 6TB WD drive has an above average failure rate - which may be due to new production line startup issues - although Seagate's 6TB drive isn't seeing those problems. The other drives with high failure rates are older models, such as the 4TB Barracuda, which is out of production."

 

The full article with easy to read charts on reliability etc. is here: http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-weve-learned-from-one-billion-hours-of-disk-drive-use/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61