These are the most (and least) reliable hard drives of 2020

The storage company Backblaze has been publishing monthly and annual statistics on the failure rate of the hard drives they use for a few years now, and since there are literally hundreds of thousands, it represents a more than reliable statistic of the reliability of the different brands of drives hard. Now the company has published the list for the entire year 2020, in which we can see which are the most reliable hard drives to date.

In 2020, Backblaze added 39,792 hard drives to their credit, and as of December 31, they had a total of 165,530 hard drives running on their servers. Of that number, 3,000 disks were system drives while 162,530 were mass data storage drives. As you will see below, they use hard drives from different manufacturers and of different capacities, so we can certainly get a very good idea of ​​the reliability of the different brands with this statistic.

The most reliable hard drives of 2020

At the end of 2020, Backblaze was monitoring 162,530 hard drives, those used for mass data storage. Of this amount, 231 disks that were used only for testing and those models that did not have at least 60 units are removed (they consider that with fewer units the statistics are not reliable). This leaves us with a total of 162,299 disks in this statistic.

For drives that have fewer than 250,000 drive days, no conclusion is justified as to their failure rate; There is not enough data over the one year period to draw conclusions, so next, we are going to analyze the data for drives with more than 250,000 drive days.

We have the Seagate 6 TB hard drives (ST6000DX000) lead the list of the most reliable hard drives with an annual failure rate (AFR) of only 0.23%, with the addition that this model is the oldest in the average age of all units listed. Closely followed are the 4 TB HGST (HMS5C4040ALE640) with a 0.27% annual failure rate, the 8 TB (HUH728080ALE600) with 0.29% and the 12 TB (HUH721212ALE600) with a 0 , 31% failure.

The average annual failure rate is 0.93%, so these models that we have seen before are well below the average, although it is true that the Seagate 18TB drives have raised this ratio quite a lot with a failure rate of 12.54%, being the least reliable hard drives. It is curious that Seagate is positioned as the most reliable brand but also the least depending on the model, but what is also undoubtedly true is that HGST still has many of the most reliable hard drives on the market, as in previous years in those who also led the table.

For the home environment, which hard drive to buy?

As consumers, as a general rule, we are not going to opt for hard drives larger than 12 TB because their price is still too high to be considered "consumer" devices. All in all, it seems that the most reliable hard drives we currently have are the 6 TB Seagate, followed by the 4 and 8 TB HGST, so if we are guided by this statistic that tells us which hard drives fail the least, do not hesitate and buy one of these units.

Now, if you are looking for drives of 10 TB or more, then you should go for the 12 TB HGSTs because with a failure rate of only 0.31% they are the least likely to fail you during use. Noteworthy, however, is the 14 TB Toshiba drives that according to this statistic have a 0.91% failure rate.