As of December 31, 2019, Blackblaze had in operation 124,956 hard drives, so of course the empirical data can be considered as reliable. Of that number, 2,229 were system disks and 122,658 storage disks, which are from which this statistic has been derived. It should be noted that as the years progress, the company is adding hard drives of greater capacity, and where some years ago the largest disks were 4 TB, now they have units of up to 14 TB capacity.
The most reliable hard drives of 2019
As we have indicated before, 122,658 hard drives are used for storage, of which discarded those that had not reached 5000 drive days (they do so to give more reliability to the data, avoiding new disks that, according to Gauss's bell, could fail at the beginning of his life), staying in 122,507 units accounted for.
As you can see, a total of 1.89% of the hard drives used failed at some point, with only the Toshiba 4TB without any broken drive. Could we say that it is the most reliable? Not really, because it is also the model with the least units and, therefore, in statistics its proportion is marginal.
So that, the most reliable hard drive of 2019 according to this statistic is the 12 TB HGST (There are two of these actually, with 0.4% and 0.56% failure rate), closely followed by 4 TB models of the same brand, and not forgetting the 14 TB Toshiba, with only 0.65% failure rate.
Conversely, less reliable hard drives have turned out to be the 12 TB Seagate with a 3.32% failure rate, followed by the 4 TB Seagate with 2%.
Comparison of reliability over time
As you can see, during 2019 many more hard drives have failed than during 2018 and 2017, but it is also true that the number of units has grown by almost 32,000 in just two years. In any case, the figures are there to show us that luckily or unfortunately, the most reliable hard drives are usually from HGST followed by those of Toshiba, while Seagate hard drives are generally at the tail of reliability.
Finally, here we can see a final statistical table that shows the reliability of hard drives from 2013 to 2019.
Here we can see the statistics more clearly, but again the winners are repeated: the 12 TB disk of HGST is the one that fails the least, with only a 0.40% ratio, while the one that fails the most is the Seagate of 4 TB with 2.67% (which is not that it is too high a percentage, everything is said).
