The best way to find out which storage drives are the most reliable is to use a few hundred thousand of them and take a look at their reliability.
This is exactly what Backblaze backup specialists have been doing for several years, before generating regular reports. This gives an interesting insight into the reliability of hard drives.
During the year 2021, Backblaze added 40,460 hard drives to its disk pool, making a total of 206,928 drives in total. Of these disks, 3,760 are boot disks and 203,168 are data storage disks.
The report contains a lot of information, but two things stand out in particular:
- The oldest drive is the most reliable: Seagate 6TB drives (model ST6000DX000) have an average age of 80.4 months (almost seven years), and they also have the lowest annualized failure rate (AFR) , or 0.11%.
- Newer drives are also doing very well: the 16TB WDC drives (model: WUH721816ALE6L0) and the 16TB Toshiba drives (model: MG08ACA16TE) were both added in 2021, and have an AFR of 0.14 and 0.91%, respectively.
Backblaze has also experienced issues with Seagate 14TB drives (model: ST14000NM0138) in its Dell storage servers. It seems that after a firmware update, the reliability of these drives has improved significantly.
Source: ZDNet.com