Which hard disk is best? Here are some pointers

By Darren Allan

Backblaze uses a hell of a lot of hard drives for its cloud backup and storage services, and every year (since 2014) the firm produces a report on what it has found to be the most (and least) reliable drives, with the review of 2015 just having been published.

So what brand or disk size should you be looking for to give you the best odds of avoiding a drive failure that could cause a great deal of inconvenience, or even mess with your personal data (though surely not your business data – after all, SMBs out there have a cast-iron backup plan in place, right?).

According to Backblaze’s stats, compiled across some 56,224 spinning HDDs, the most reliable brand is HGST with an overall cumulative failure rate (since the company started these surveys) of just 1%. Toshiba and Seagate both came in between 3% and 4%, whereas Western Digital was the clear loser in the reliability stakes with an overall failure rate of 7%.

But what disks were Backblaze buying the most of during last year? Seagate hard drives, not HGST.

Seagate supreme?

Backblaze noted: “Nearly all of the 16,000+ drives purchased in 2015 have been Seagate drives. Of the Seagate drives …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components