Cloud storage experts BlackBlaze have posted a blog entry just a few days where the reveal hard drive failure rates for the third quarter of this year. It’s quite enlightening article if you’re in the habit of purchasing 3.5 inch hard drives for mass storage systems, NASes or RAID arrays, or wherever you’re using to store your vast collection of Japanese Anime. Although it’s not always easy to asses which brands and models are most likely to fail, the data presented by BackBlaze does paint a picture of sorts:

Below is the hard drive failure data for Q3 2016. This chart is just for the period of Q3 2016. The hard drive models listed below are data drives, not boot drives. We only list drive models that have 45 or more of that model deployed.”

A couple of comments on the chart: The models that have an annualized failure rate of 0.00% had zero hard drive failures in Q3 2016. The “annualized failure rate” is computed as follows: ((Failures)/(Drive Days/365)) * 100. Therefore, consider the number of “Failures” and “Drive Days” before reaching any conclusions about the failure rate.

Looking at the data table presented by Blackblaze, it’s obvious to see that certain drive models have a higher ‘Annualized Failure Rate’, in particular certain Western Digital 6B drives and one particular model of Seagate 4GB drives. It’s always important to consider that not all models have the same retail price. Enterprise-class drives should last longer as they certainly cost more.

The article actually goes into some detail and is well worth a look if you’re in the market for a new hard disk drive or two. You can check it out here on the BlackBlaze blog here.