Cloud storage company BackBlaze has published the second edition of its annual hard drive failure report which analyses, dissects and determines the failure rates for spinning HDDs it purchased.
Many used the first report, issued last year, as a benchmark to determine the most reliable drive to buy.
HGST and Seagate were the two standout brands of the survey, which sifted through data collected from running more than 41,000 drives in the whole of 2014.
4TB was the capacity that had the fewest number of failures with failure rates as low as 1.4% for the HGST drives and 2.6% for Seagate.
BackBlaze's Brian Beach was quick to point out that the absence of other brands (Toshiba and Western Digital namely) was due to the fact that they were more expensive.
3TB hard disk drives fared worse across brands (with the exception of HGST), probably due to the fact that manufacturing process for that capacity were not mature enough.
And because BackBlaze's service doesn't depend on how fast the drives work, that is not taken into account to determine the best hard disk drives for its business model.
The company, which is known for its unlimited backup plans, is also rolling out 6TB hard disk drives with 8TB and 10TB models likely to be tested in a near future.
- Check our review of the 6TB Seagate Enterprise Capacity drive which was featured in this survey.
