These are the most dependable hard drives around

(Image credit: Shutterstock / Daniel Krason)

If you’re curious to learn which hard drives are most reliable right now, a new report from Backblaze could deliver all the answers.

The cloud storage and data backup company regularly tests hard drives for reliability, and analyzed just above 203,000 different units for its 2021 report.

Of all the drives that were analyzed, the oldest ones also seem to be the most reliable ones, as well, with the 6TB Seagate drive model ST6000DX000 sporting an average age of 80.4 months, but also the lowest annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.11%.

New drives faring well

Overall, Backblaze found the AFR across the board was 1.01%, a tiny bit up, compared to last year’s 0.93%. Still, that’s a good sign, as now the drop in 2020, from 1.83% the year before, was not an anomaly.

Lifetime AFR (not to be confused with annual failure rate, in which the number of drives remains the same for each model during the analysis period) sits at 1.4% at the moment, down from 1.54% a year ago, and 1.62% two years ago.

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New drives are also doing relatively well. The 16TB WDC drive model WUH721816ALE6L0, as well as the Toshiba 16TB drive MG08ACA16TE (both added last year), have an AFR of 0.14% and 0.91%, respectively.

The report has also stated that the 14TB Seagate drive ST14000NM0138 has been performing relatively poorly in its Dell storage servers, until it had its firmware updated. After the update, the reliability of the drive has significantly improved.

In 2021, the company added a total of 40,460 new hard drives, and at the end of the year, had a total of 206,928 drives under management. With 3,760 being boot drives, the company ended up analyzing exactly 203,168 data drives.

You might also want to check out our list of the best large capacity drives right now

Via: ZDNet

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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.