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Backblaze stats on 27,000 hard drives show which ones keep on ticking

<!--CONTENT START--><p><img alt="chart showing drive failure rates" data-credit="Backblaze" data-mep="111213" src="http://o.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/adam/f82a509db3483b9ca7df84c9a47efec3/blog-fail-drives-manufacture.jpg" /></p>

<p>When your business value proposition is delivering inexpensive, reliable cloud backup for thousands of customers, you're going to learn a thing or two about drive reliability. The Backblaze (http://backblaze.com) team has been sharing that HDD savvy (gleaned from several years' experience and more than 75 petabytes of storage (http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibrations-storage-pod-3-0/)) in a series of blog posts over the past couple of months, and we've been fascinated to note (http://www.tuaw.com/2013/11/12/backblaze-answers-the-question-how-long-do-hard-drives-last/) their discoveries. Now Brian Beach at Backblaze has addressed the eternal question: What hard drive should I buy? (http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/)</p>

<p>BB's StoragePods (http://blog.backblaze.com/category/storage-pod/) are packed with consumer-grade hard drives just like the ones you'd buy at Costco or Best Buy (http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/11/30/crowdsourcing-hard-drives/), so it's reasonable to use Backblaze's failure stats as a proxy for how these drives might perform on your very own desk with your very own Mac. Granted, drives in a StoragePod are in more continuous use and subject to more vibration than a home-use drive, so your mileage may vary.</p>

<p>Of the 27,000-plus drives running in Backblaze's server racks, the vast majority (almost 13,000 each) are Seagate or Hitachi models. There are only a couple of drives that Backblaze won't buy or try -- WD's Green 3TB drives and Seagate LP (low power) 2TB models -- because the BB StoragePod environment doesn't agree with them, possibly due to vibration sensitivity on spin-down/spin-up. Other than that, the company buys drives on a commodity basis, going with the best GB/$ ratio available at a given point in time.</p>

<p>Best of the BB batch? Hitachi/HGST's Deskstar 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB models (http://www.hgst.com/hard-drives/internal-drive-kits/desktop-drive-kits). Beach says, "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." At the moment, due to price fluctuations, the drives of choice are a Seagate HDD.15 4 TB unit and the Western Digital 3 TB Red.</p>

<p>As Beach notes, however, Hitachi's storage unit (http://www.hgst.com/) (originally purchased from IBM in 2002 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers)) has been bought (and split) in the past two years, with the 3.5-inch business going to Toshiba and the 2.5-inch product line going to WD. Although HGST is still marketing and making the Deskstar line (http://www.hgst.com/hard-drives/internal-drive-kits/desktop-drive-kits), it's likely that technology will settle under the Toshiba brand in the future.</p><p style="padding:5px;clear:both;">Backblaze stats on 27,000 hard drives show which ones keep on ticking (http://www.tuaw.com/2014/01/31/backblaze-stats-on-27-000-hard-drives-show-which-ones-keep-on-ti/) originally appeared on Apple news, reviews and how-tos since 2004 (http://www.tuaw.com) on Fri, 31 Jan 2014 16:00:00 EST.  Please see our terms for use of feeds (http://legal.aol.com/terms-of-service/full-terms/).<br style="clear:both;"></p><h6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"></h6>Source (http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/)&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2014/01/31/backblaze-stats-on-27-000-hard-drives-show-which-ones-keep-on-ti/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry">Permalink[/url]&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tuaw.com/forward/20820365/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email">Email this[/url]&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2014/01/31/backblaze-stats-on-27-000-hard-drives-show-which-ones-keep-on-ti/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry">Comments[/url]

Source: Backblaze stats on 27,000 hard drives show which ones keep on ticking (http://www.tuaw.com/2014/01/31/backblaze-stats-on-27-000-hard-drives-show-which-ones-keep-on-ti/)