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The annual Backblaze hard drive reliability report 2023 has been released and it has revealed that one model of 8TB Seagate hard drive has yet to have a single drive fail in the 18 months since the first of the drives was installed.
Each year, Backblaze releases a report on the currently 274,622 hard drives it uses in its data centers, showcasing the failure rate of the drives throughout the years of hard labor they take on providing backup solutions for the company’s users. Generally, among the thousands of any individual drive the company uses, there will be a few that fail. However, one Seagate drive has yet to fail at all.
The Seagate ST8000NM000A is the drive in question, with Backblaze deploying 204 of the drives in its datacenters. That’s actually a rather low number compared to the thousands or tens of thousands of drives of other models that it uses, plus they haven’t been in service all that long, but it’s still an impressive feat.
For comparison, the next most reliable drive in its report is the Western Digital WUH721816ALE6L4, which has a failure rate of 0.3%, or just three in 1,000 drives. This 16TB model is also a relatively young addition to the fleet, with the average age in months being just 11.6. That compares to 14.1 months for the Seagate ST8000NM000A and well over 50 months for many other drives in the roster. Still, with 21,607 of the WUH721816ALE6L4 drives deployed, it’s still decently representative example.
As for the worst performing drive in 2023, it was the Seagate ST14000NM000J, which is a 14TB model. It had a failure rate of 14.64%, although with just 77 of the drives in use, it’s one of the least numerous drives the company has employed.
While we don’t generally recommend a list of best hard drives these days, as they’re all but irrelevant when it comes to gaming PC performance – seriously, go and buy an SSD from our best SSD for gaming guide instead – they are still a useful resource for if you have to store lots of data. As such, it’s good to know that the Seagate ST8000NM000A or Western Digital WUH721816ALE6L4 should be reliable options if you do need all that storage space.
