Why You Should Buy 4TB Hard Drives and Avoid 3TB Hard Drives
After further researching detailed reports of the most trusted brands of hard drives and consumer hard drives versus corporate hard drives, Backblaze found some interesting data that could help you choose your next drive. One tip: stay away from 3TB drives.
The backup company assessed its 41,213 hard drives (most of them consumer) for annual failure rates and recommended 4TB drives for value and reliability:
We love all the 4TB drives we bought this year. For this price, you get a lot of storage space and the drive failure rate is very low. The Seagate Desktop HDD. 15 has the best price and we have a LOT of them. There are more than 12 thousand of them. The bounce rate is a very low 2.6% per year. Business benefits from low cost and reliability.
HGST actuators, although slightly more expensive, have an even lower failure rate of 1.4%. The difference is not enough to be an important factor in a purchase, but when there is a good price, we charge it. We have more than 12 thousand such drives.
However, 3TB drives from all manufacturers are not as good:
HGST Deskstar 5K3000 3TB drives have proven to be very reliable, but expensive compared to other models (including similar 4TB drives from HGST). The Western Digital Red 3TB drives have an annual failure rate of 7.6% – a bit high, but acceptable. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 hard drives with a capacity of 3 TB are another matter. We’ll share how we dealt with their errors in the next blog post.
And here’s a quick recap of the history of the Seagate 3 TB:
Anyway, if you’re looking to buy a new drive, Backblaze’s experiment can help you reduce the chances of one of them failing. See the blog post below for a list of drives and their failure rates.
What’s the best hard drive? | Backblaze