According to BackBlaze, the company has as studied how its data center’s hard drives have failed during the course of 12 months and has stated that Western Digital is culpable for more hard drive failures than any other brand on the planet. These important statistics will definitely be useful for consumers because Backblaze uses off-the-shelf hard drives for its data centers (the same products that regular consumers use). The analysis carried out by the company states that during 2015, it used 56,224 HDDs organized in 1,249 storage pods, growing from 39,690 HDDs which it had at the start of year. These hard drives varied in capacity between 1TB to 8TB storage, and according to BackBlaze, it only used four hard drive manufacturers, which were HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital. The cloud backup solutions provider observed that hard drives tend to fail differently depending on their make, model, and capacity, but here is the interesting metric that the company manage to dot down. Western Digital hard drives had an annual failure rate of nearly 7 percent. In comparison, Seagate was the more reliable firm with an annual failure rate of 1 percent, followed by Toshiba with nearly 3.5 percent. HGST proved to be the most reliable company out there, with an annual failure rate of just over 1 percent. It should be noted that the company’s data center used 4TB hard drives in most of its storage pods. For this category of hard drives, Toshiba drives failed the most, followed by Seagate, while Western Digital and HGST fared better. After you have purchased a mechanical hard drive, it is imperative that you take the utmost of your storage product. Keep its temperature till a certain limit by employing an effective airflow system in your computer casing and perform regular maintenance tasks in order to prevent the speed of the drive entering a free fall. Backblaze
