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IT Help Desk => ICT => Topic started by: rakib_hasan on April 13, 2015, 05:53:01 PM
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It’s the eternal question for PC owners: Which manufacturer makes the most reliable hard drives? Backblaze, the unlimited online backup company, has been following this story for years now, and its latest 2015 data sheds some new light on the subject. Backblaze currently has over 41,000 hard drives powered up and constantly spinning. And as you can imagine, it is very much in Backblaze’s interests to ensure that it buys reliable hard drives. Every time a drive fails, it takes considerable time and effort to pull the drive, slot in a new one, and rebuild the RAID array.
So while it’s generally known how long hard drives actually live for, it stands to reason that some manufacturers make drives that are more reliable than others. But whose?
Which hard drive manufacturer is the most reliable?
To answer that question, we took a look at Backblaze’s latest numbers. The company breaks down its data in two ways — by manufacturer, and by specific drive. The data is fairly complex, but we’ll try to break it down into bits of easy-to-digest, actionable information. (Read: How a hard drive works.)
As of the end of December 2014, Backblaze had 15,528 Seagate drives, 22,902 Hitachi drives, 1,174 Western Digital drives, and 47 Toshiba drives. These drives are not all the same age — some are several years old, while many were installed in the past year, including thousands of brand new 4TB and even a few 6TB models.
The odd numbers are because Backblaze basically buys whatever drive offers the most competitive dollar-per-gigabyte ratio, with reliability being a secondary factor. For most of the last five years, Seagate and Hitachi have offered the best price-per-gig, with Western Digital Red and Toshiba DT01ACA drives only recently becoming viable (although there are too few Toshiba drives to draw any conclusions yet).
Source: Extreme Tech