Best hard drives in the world

Backblaze has released its hard drive performance statistics for 2022, revealing the most reliable drives under its management during the past year.

The company regularly analyses tens of thousands of boot and data drives that it uses to provide backup and storage services to its customers.

It focuses on hard drive failure rates to measure how reliable they are.

As of 31 December 2022, Backblaze was managing 235,608 drives, of which 4,299 were used for booting and 231,309 for storage.

For its evaluation, it focused on the latter and removed 388 drives from consideration as they were used for either testing purposes or were models for which it did not have at least 60 drives.

That left 230,921 hard drives to analyse for its latest report. These included drives from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital.

During the year, only one hard drive suffered zero failures — an 8TB Seagate unit with model number ST8000NM000A.

However, Backblaze said it used this model to replace failed drives and only recorded a limited 22,836 drive days between them.

With the addition of its 2022 stats, Backblaze compiled the table below to show the lifetime annualised failure rates (AFRs) of the 29 drive models included in its analysis.

The lifetime analysis covers the period from 20 April 2013 to 31 December 2022.

Overall, Backblaze saw an increase in drive failures between 2021 and 2022, pushing the lifetime AFR down slightly to 1.39% from 1.40%.

It pointed to its ageing hard drive fleet as the main culprit behind this drop.

Considering the data in the table above on a brand-specific basis, it would appear that HGST and Western Digital drives were the more reliable brands.

However, Backblaze said it was important to consider that these drives tended to be more expensive than those from Seagate or Toshiba.

“Before you throw your Seagate and Toshiba drives in the trash, you might want to consider the lifecycle cost of a given hard drive model versus its failure rate,” Backblaze stated.

“In general, Seagate drives are less expensive and their failure rates are typically higher in our environment.”

“But, their failure rates are typically not high enough to make them less cost-effective over their lifetime.”

In addition, the 6TB Seagate drives are the oldest in the company’s fleet, with an average age of 92.5 months.

Despite this, they had a lifetime failure rate of 0.89%, with 0.68% in 2022.

Backblaze said this was a respectable number at any time, but even more so after eight years of duty.

The graph and table below compare the AFRs of each brand’s drives over each quarter from the start of 2020.

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Best hard drives in the world