Seagate is the disk brand with the highest failure rate, according to backblaze

Online storage provider Backblaze has released a new round of failure statistics for its hard drives, corresponding to the third quarter of 2019, the period ending on September 30. They use Seagate, HGST and Toshiba hard drives.

Backblaze details the failure rate of its more than 100, 000 hard drives, Seagate is the least reliable

Backblaze ended the third quarter with some 115, 151 hard drives spread across four data centers across two continents. Of that number, there were 2, 098 boot drives and 113, 053 data drives.

Backblaze analyzes the failure rates of all hard drives that were in operation during that stage. These data are very interesting, since they mark which are the most reliable hard drive models at the moment.

The most recent data accounts for the hard drives that were in service as of September 30, 2019, and this time Backblaze skipped a quarterly report. The reason, the company says, was the increasing number of data integrity checks that could potentially have dragged future hard drive failures into this quarter.

However, Backblaze says that, for a given drive model, the number of drive failures over its lifetime should not increase and that “fragment integrity checks may have done nothing to increase the number of unit failures that occurred in the third quarter. ”

Although quarterly failure rates were found not to "vary much from previous quarters, " the company was not comfortable publishing them at the time and only released the following chart:

Failure rate shared by Blackblaze

The latest figures show a decrease in the number of units of the Seagate 4TB model (ST4000DM000), as well as its percentage of AFR. Although it is still the highest with 2.67%, with a fall of 0.05 percent from its AFR value of 2.7%, as previously reported.

Visit our guide to the best hard drives on the market

Meanwhile, the HGST 12TB model (HUH721212ALN604), which was the least-fail according to the latest report, experienced a small 0.10% increase in its AFR, which increased it to 0.47%. Its 4TB sibling (HMS5C404040BLE640) is now the least faulty drive by the narrowest margin.

Backblaze says that by the fourth quarter it will track two different groups of units internally. One group will consist of disks that went through accelerated fragment integrity checks, while the second group will consist of units put into service after these checks were reduced.

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