Backblaze has just revealed its latest HDD failure rates statistics. The list also includes updates about 2016's Q4 and full-year analysis.

Since 2013, online backup solution provider Backblaze has released a list of its hard drives and their failure rates. This is in order to shed some light on the most and least reliable manufacturers. There are 1,225 drives that failed in 2016, which means the drive failure rate for 2016 was just 1.95 percent. This is an improving figure compared to the 2.47 percent that died in 2015, and heaps below the 6.39 percent in 2014.

Compiling 2016's failure rates by drive size, independent of manufacturer, From Backblaze data, we see that 3TB hard drives are the most reliable with 1.40 percent failure rates. The 5TB hard drives are the least reliable at a 2.22 percent failure rate. If we classify the drives according to its manufacturers, HGST top the list. It powers 34 percent (24,545) of the total (71,939) drives. In addition, it has a measly of 0.60 percent failure rate.

WDC drives are on the rear in terms of reliability, according to Backblaze. It has an average of 3.88 percent failure rate. Seagate followed at 2.65 percent. From the data, one must consider that Backblaze only had 1,626 WDC drives, and only 61 of those failed. Furthermore, it had 45,531 Seagate drives; 1,029 of which had failed during the year.

In 2016, three drives models ended the year with zero failures, according to Backblaze. Both the 4 TB Toshiba and the 8 TB HGST models performed the whole year without a drive failure. The 8 TB Seagate (ST8000NM0055) drives, which were deployed in November 2016, also recorded zero failures.

The numbers provided came from Backblaze's observation of the 72,100 drives it used for storing customer data. The result is not the product of arduous scientific tests and processes, says Slash Gear