When buying a new component, we do not usually look at the most reliable brands, that is, those whose products offer the best quality and we know that they will work well not only on the first day, but continuously for a long time. Either by the materials used or by an efficient assembly. One of the most failing components? The HDDs, that is why we are going to talk about the brands of hard drives with fewer failures, or not.
The problem with hard drives is that they are the part that can fail the most over time due to continued use. If you are a regular user, that you are going to use the unit for personal issues, nothing happens. The problem, on the other hand, comes when you are a company and you have to save all the billing for 5 years and of course, losing the hard drives is a problem. However, when we go to the store they don’t tell us if one brand is more reliable than another.
What brands of hard drives have fewer failures?
Where hard drives are used most continuously and under continuous stress is in cloud applications and while slowly but surely they are being replaced by SSDs, they are still in continuous use. Well, that is the testing environment that the backup company Backblaze has used and has been able to test it with its 235,608 units.
So given the scenario, they are more than reliable in telling us which hard drives are the most reliable.
- The most reliable hard drive in 2022 has been Seagate’s Exos 8TB (ST8000NM000A) which has given 0 failures in all of 2022.
- On the other hand, the least reliable have been the GST Ultrastar He8 8 TB (HUH728080ALE604) with a 5.27% failure rate and the Seagate Exos X14 14TB (ST14000NM0138) with 5.7% of them failing. So if you see they set up a computer with those hard drives, run away.
The paradox, as you can see, is that the most reliable hard drive brand, if we stick to the best drive, is the same as the one that makes the worst. So in the end all this turns out to be a lottery and it cannot be said that one brand is better than another in itself. So the important thing will be to look at the guarantee offered by the manufacturer and see how many hours of use they promise us. Since many times, that is the reason for the difference in price between a model, another of the same type and capacity.
The continued degradation of HDDs
From the Backblaze study, what interests us is the concept of AFR, which is the annual failure rate of hard drives. That is, the number of them that fail each year and this is growing as we talk about units that have been in operation for several years. Not in vain, 44.5% of the units that have failed in 2022 are with capacities of 4 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB and 10 TB. Of course, we would be missing the truth if we denied that the main reason for his death was because they were units that had been operating for longer.
So it is not a question of which are the most reliable brands of hard drives, but to understand that these drives degrade over time and the older they are in use, the more likely they are to fail. Hence, we do not recommend under any circumstances buying second-hand units or selling them, you never know what they could do with a badly formatted hard drive.