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.