hard drive failure rates

[haven]

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

Online backup company Backblaze owns more than 20,000 hard drives. A company engineer just posted an interesting set of statistics that show the company's experience with hard drive failure rates, sorted by drive size and manufacturer. Also of interest is the percentage of drives that fail after 36 months of service. The adage, "You get what you pay for" certainly applies here.

Backblaze offers "unlimited" data storage to customers for $5 a month per computer. Prepay for one or two years for lower rates.

At home, I use an external 2GB Western Digital drive and Apple's Time Machine software to continuously back up my iMac. The external backup saved my bacon when the iMac's internal drive failed a while back.

 

[spressomon]

Haven't seen failure rate % but sure seems to be quite a few people complaining about SSD failures apart of MacBooks...

 

[Rallyroo]

At home, I use an external 2GB Western Digital drive and Apple's Time Machine software to continuously back up my iMac. The external backup saved my bacon when the iMac's internal drive failed a while back.

I think you mean 2 TERAbytes, not 2 GIGAbytes?

 

[Scott Brady]

Makes me thankful that our FOUR complete backups of all image and video are on (mostly) Hitachi and (secondarily) WD.

We have about 100 TB in play, and have not experienced a failure with the hitachi drives. We have lost a few of the 2.5" WDs, but in fairness, those are the portables.

We have fully transitioned to SSD for portable backups. The price hurts, but I sleep better.