Hard Drive Quarterly Report

Consumer backup provider Backblaze has released their quarterly hard drive performance report. This report is always notable because it is the largest ongoing study across a variety of non-enterprise hard drives. In other words: it measures what matters.

The #1 takeaway for us? HGST comes out looking really good compared to Seagate and Western Digital (even though Western Digital owns HGST). The 12TB Seagate and 8TB HGST have higher failure rates than we’d want to see for what we assume are newer drives.

Finally, these results are aimed at NAS drives, at JM Addington and Kairos Dynamic Digital we use SSDs nearly exclusively in day-to-day operations, such as workstations and laptops.