Hard Drive Recovery Group, a professional data recovery service, has released a blog post that alerts users about consumer hard drives that are known to have high failure rates. The blog post uses a report from BackBlaze, a cloud storage platform, to arrive at its conclusions and recommendations for hard drives.
The blog post begins by reminding the reader that the best protection against data loss is a data backup. Having a data backup is the safest way to ensure that a user does not have to run to a data recovery service, in case a hard drive containing sensitive data happens to fail.
The blog post then says that another good way to avoid the prospect of data loss is to make a well-researched purchasing decision. Investing in the right hardware with information that has been corroborated from legitimate sources can save a lot of hassle further down the line. The blog post refers to a hard drive failure rate study published by Backblaze.com and shares its findings with its readers.
The blog post quotes the original article that says that Backblaze recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in its data centers since April 2013. At the end of the fourth quarter of 2016, Backblaze was monitoring 72,100 data drives. Excluding the drives which were only used for testing purposes and also excluding the drive models for which they did not have at least 45 drives, left Backblaze.com with 71,939 production hard drives.
Before sharing the actual numbers, the blog post mentions a caveat that will be relevant to many mainstream consumers who are relying on it for a purchasing decision. It says that since the hard drives were from enterprise servers, they are not likely to be the kind of hard drive models that are available to home-based consumers. Even if the drives are available for purchase, they might be prohibitively expensive to use in a non-enterprise setting.
The blog post then says that Backblaze.com reported 1225 failed hard drives for the year. This number works out to 3.36 drive failures per day or around 5 drives per workday. The overall hard drive failure rate for 2016 was 1.95% which was a decrease from the failure rate of 2.47% for 2015. It was an even more significant improvement on the hard drive failure rate of 6.39% for 2014. The blog post says that the trend suggests that hard drive manufacturers are improving their manufacturing techniques to give consumers more resilient hard drives with lower rates of failure.
The blog post then delves into the actual recommendations as it reveals that the 4 TB Toshiba, the 8 TB HGST, and the 8 TB Seagate (ST8000NM0055) drive models went the whole year without any failures. The blog post also mentions that though the drive models had 0 recorded failures, they represented a small number of drives which could be the reason for their spotless record. The 8 TB size emerges as a sweet spot that strikes a delicate balance between hard drive resilience and storage capacity.
Finally, the blog post reveals the worst-performing models that are best avoided by consumers. They are the Seagate ST3000DM001, 3TB (26% failure rate), Seagate ST320LT007, 2TB (47.7% failure rate), and finally the Seagate ST1500DL003, 1.5TB (90.9% failure rate). The article ends with a reminder to the readers that some Seagate customers are currently suing the company for selling them defective hard drives.
Hard Drive Recovery Group provides safe, secure hard drive data recovery for Mac and PC hard disk drives, both via software and an ISO-certified clean lab hands-on data retrieval. It has been operational for over 20 years and has recovered crucial data for thousands of customers, both individuals, and companies, all across North America. The company has a no recovery, no charge policy. It also offers a 48-hour turnaround expedited service for those who need it. The company also offers a free data recovery consultation at the toll-free number 1-866-341-4374.
###
For more information about Hard Drive Recovery Group, contact the company here:
Hard Drive Recovery Group
Maureen Davies
1-866-341-4374
mgr@harddriverecovery.org
12 Mauchly, Building C,
Irvine, CA
92618
