Your Hard Drive is not Infallible...
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Photo by Manuel Geissinger from Pexels
I consider our computer hard drives to be the filing cabinet of our electronic law office. My dad used to tell me stories of looking for similar past pleadings through the rows of filing cabinets in my grandfather's small law office to use as templates. Now we can keep a copy of almost our entire "paper" file in a piece of plastic slightly bigger than a deck of cards. This, in addition to the copy on our laptop or desktop computer. (Don't forget to make multiple backups! See my post on April 1, 2019: Help Prevent Your Law Office's Data Loss!
However, the reliability of these little pieces of plastics with multiple times more moving parts than an old, steel four-drawer filing cabinet has to be better scrutinized. We used to worry only about property insurance and making sure the filing cabinets were fire-resistant. Now we also have to worry about dropping hard disks or the computers they are housed in as they are frequently in motion. The good news is our hard drives appear to get better and better over time.
I came across this report from Backblaze (note I use Backblaze for "a" cloud back up of my office drive). Backblaze has a "farm" of hard drives for their clients. Their farm consists of hard drives from three leading providers, HGST (owned by Western Digital), Seagate, and Toshiba. The storage sizes of their drives range from 4 to 14 TB.
To ensure their clients don't lose data, they have multiple copies of their clients' files distributed throughout their data farm. This requires Backblaze to have over 100,000 disk drives (of various sizes). This provides Backblaze with a large data pool to obtain results. See the image below.
HGST and Toshiba has the lowest Annual Failure Rate ("AFR") of less than 1%. While Seagate drives, appear to have an average of over 1% (with a range reaching as high as 2.67% and a low (only one type) reaching below 1%.
This is by no means a scientific test. But, it does give you some thought about what brand to buy the next time you need a hard drive. Meanwhile, be careful of those "cheaper" brands, as you may find yourself getting what you paid for - something that turns out cheap…
