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Backblaze Hard Disk Drive Stats for Q1 2022 – DriveSavers Confirms: Brand Doesn’t Matter

DriveSavers resellers and customers often ask which brand hard drive is more reliable or least likely to fail. U.S.-based Backblaze, a scalable cloud backup and storage solution, recently released a report that helps shed light on this common question.

Backblaze maintains data centers housing hundreds of thousands of HDDs and SSDs. Part of their regular maintenance involves scrutinizing drive failure throughout their data centers to ensure against data loss and identify the safest way to store customer data.

Since 2013, Backblaze has released the results of its ongoing examination in comprehensive quarterly studies. These quarterly reports regarding the reliability of the drives that store customer data have become well known in technology circles, and techies worldwide eagerly study each edition the moment it’s released because the information they share has value across the IT world, from data center managers handling large RAID systems to service providers working with consumers.

Last week, Backblaze published its latest report, the Drive Stats for Q1 2022, focusing on 207,478 hard disk drives. After reviewing the Backblaze report and the data, our most significant takeaway is that, as DriveSavers has always said based on the devices we see for data recovery, the brand doesn’t matter.

For example, one highly popular brand suffered the second-highest failure rate of all of the models studied by Backblaze (5.86%). At the same time, another device of the same manufacturer experienced a zero percent failure rate despite all of the drives of that model being seven years old – a considerable age for an HDD doing the type of heavy lifting required by a data center.

You’re likely curious which drives from each model studied were the best performers. Click here to read the full results of Backblaze’s analysis.

Mike Cobb, Director of Engineering and CISO
As Director of Engineering, Mike Cobb manages the day-to-day operations of the Engineering Department, including the physical and logical recoveries of rotational media, SSDs, smart devices and flash media. He also oversees the R&D efforts for past, present, and future storage technologies. Mike encourages growth and ensures that each of the departments and their engineers continues to gain knowledge in their field. Each DriveSavers engineer has been trained to ensure the successful and complete recovery of data is their top priority.

As Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Mike oversees cybersecurity at DriveSavers, including maintaining and updating security certifications such as SOC 2 Type II compliance, coordinating company security policy, and employee cybersecurity education.

Mike joined DriveSavers in 1994 and has a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Riverside.

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