I recently found on LifeHacker an interesting article that pointed to a blog post on the BackBlaze blog.
BackBlaze is a company that provides online backup service. I haven’t used or tried their service yet, but you might imagine that such an organization would deploy thousands upon thousands of hard drives. Who better to speak to which ones are reliable?
Lately, I’ve been buying Samsung hard drives, and there isn’t a large enough sample size in BackBlaze’s data sets to speak to the reliability of Samsung drives. Don’t be fooled by the high percentage for Samsung in the charts: The sample size is too small.
That being said, there are clearly ones to avoid. Those include Seagate Drives, especially the LP series, and the WD Green series. They spin down and up frequently. If you are not using your computer put it to sleep – but it’s hard on a drive to spin it up and down repeatedly.
There’s a lot of detail in the blog post, but in general, Hitachi drives seem to perform the best.
There’s no excuse not to employ good backups, in any case. Hard drives fail – even the more reliable SSD ones. Disasters happen. So keep your data backed up! Backblaze does have competitive prices and compares to what we use, which is CrashPlan.