Backblaze releases its hard drive reliability report for the first quarter of 2017
Backblaze releases its hard drive reliability report for the first quarter of 2017
A cloud backup and storages services company Backblaze has a special interest in how various storage devices perform including how long they work and how reliable specific brands and models are. Backblaze has now recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in their data centers for over four years which is one of the most extensive databases that track such data.
Backblaze specifically uses quarterly statistics to look for anomalies among different HDDs, to help determine which manufacturers and models are particularly reliable and particularly unreliable. If you are going to purchase a new storage device and are looking for a good source of information on the most reliable hard drives, the Backblaze database can provide you with some interesting information worth your attention.
The company has recently published a new hard drive reliability report which is based on statistics data collected during the first quarter of 2017. Backblaze uses hard drives from primarily four main vendors: Toshiba, WD, HGST, and Seagate. There are currently 17 different hard drive models that are between 3TB and 8TB in storage space. The analysis looks back for over four years of data for 82,516 HDDs in the company's database. The company found that its current annualized hard drive failure rate was a little higher than the usual 2.11% which may be explained by the influx of more than 10,000 new hard drives which tend to fail early.
The company also began using high capacity enterprise-level HDD in its data centers, specifically adding almost 2,500 Seagate 8TB HDDs. Currently, the company uses 3 different 8TB models and their failure rate is less than 2%. These early data is really encouraging as they tell us that large capacities HDDs are generally safe to use.
But there are certain limits to the statement, of course. One of them is that if you store a large amount of data on a single large capacity HDD, you may lose that large amount of data at once if the drive fails. That's why it is recommended having multiple backups, especially for mission critical data.
Blackblaze hard drive reliability report can help you choosing a long-lasting option, but sooner or later even the most reliable hard drive can fall victim to logical or physical failure. If you don't have a backup and your critical data gets inaccessible, you will need to call on professional data recovery services to get sensitive information back from a failed HDD.
ACE Data Recovery team makes the best choice when it comes to retrieving any data from any type of storage device. ACEs have enough experience and state-of-the-art tools to perform the most complex data recovery operations and the company's engineers can develop highly specific solutions to recover data from any type of storage device known to enterprise customers.