Backblaze has released a hard drive report for the third quarter of 2016.

Backblaze is a company that specializes in providing cloud hosting services, but network users are better known for their hard drive reports, which are based on their own outage statistics and other parameters.

In its work, the company uses exactly the user, rather than industrial models of drives, so the company's reports are more than close to the audience and can provide guidance on what is worth buying and what is not. His last quarterly report, Backblaze, was published last week on its official website.

The backblaze disk array is based on Seagate HDDs (about 40 thousand disks) and thanks to the report it is possible to get the most information from the manufacturer’s products. Then you can select HGST and their disks (about 22 thousand) and only after - WD (1.5 thousand) and Toshiba (0.25 thousand). Below you can find a summary table of Backblaze by the number of disks, models, total time worked and the number of breakdowns:
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As can be seen from the statistics above, the largest number of disk failures falls on the Seagate HDD with a capacity of 4 TB model ST4000DM000. This disc, released on the market in 2013, forms the basis of the Blackblaze array: in total, the company uses 34744 HDDs of this model. It is expected among the ST4000DM000 that the largest number of failures (278) was recorded, with an annualized intensity of 3.18%. But according to the latest figures, these discs from Seagate are far from the most unreliable.

Worst of all, the last quarter showed HDD from Seagate, but another model - ST4000DX000 or Seagate Barracuda XT of 3.9 (4) TB. Of the 192 disks used, only five failed, which on an annualized basis equals a failure of 10.20% of the array.

At the same time, Seagate discs with a capacity of 8 TB proved to be surprisingly well, although it is widely believed that household HDDs of greater volumes are less stable in operation. Of the array at 5120 HDD for the quarter, only 15 units failed, which in terms of a year gives a figure of only 1.46% of failures.

Separately, pay attention to the 6TB HDD from WD. According to statistics, even with a small number of disks in its use, Backblaze recorded a considerable number of failures on the model WD60EFRX (red) 6TB. Of the 451 disks, 13 failed, which gives 11.31% of failures in terms of a year.

All other HDDs used by Backblaze either did not refuse at all, or their failures are within the limits of statistical error. The disks from Toshiba showed themselves best of all, but with the total number of HDDs used by this manufacturer (about 250 pieces in all), one cannot speak about the representativeness of these data. If we compare the two main "players" of the Backblaze array (HGST Hitachi and Seagate), then the hard drives of the Japanese conglomerate can be considered the most fault-tolerant.

At the same time, disks from HGST are significantly more expensive (by 20-30 percent or more). In this case, 8 TB disks from Seagate, in general, showed themselves well. A large enough array of almost 5 thousand HDDs has half the number of failures than the older model.