[osolo]

I really appreciate these blog posts and have used the data they present when buying HDDs for personal use.

One thing that bothers me is that the data presented doesn't really take into account the age of the HDDs. For example, if a batch of HDDs of a particular model is 6 years old and has a failure rate of 12%, that really doesn't tell me much except that it's an old HDD.

What I'd like to know, for a given model, what the blended failure rate is after 3mo, 6mo, 12mo, 24mo etc of operational time. That would be a real apples-to-apples comparison.

[polarix]

http://bioinformare.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/survival-analysi... has graphs of survival rate over time broken down by manufacturer and model. Far more informative, you're right. I don't think Backblaze uses 6 year old drives. :-)

[osolo]

Thanks for sharing this. It's exactly what I was looking for.

tldr; It clearly shows that HGST has an overall superior survival rate over time. WD is a distant second and Seagate in third (although the Seagate ST4000DM000 model is exceptional and fairs very well).

[atYevP]

That graph is pretty dope! When it first came out we had fun diving in to it! Glad someone is using our data-set for fun stuff!

[atYevP]

> What I'd like to know, for a given model, what the blended failure rate is after 3mo, 6mo, 12mo, 24mo etc of operational time. That would be a real apples-to-apples comparison.

You might actually be able to pull that from the raw data. We post it all here -> https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html in case you wanted to play around with it!