"Backblaze ... buys whatever drive offers the most competitive dollar-per-gigabyte ratio, with reliability being a secondary factor
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As of the end of December 2014, Backblaze had 15,528 Seagate drives, 22,902 Hitachi drives, 1,174 Western Digital drives, and 47 Toshiba drives. These drives are not all the same age — some are several years old, while many were installed in the past year, including thousands of brand new 4TB and even a few 6TB models.Hitachi drives are by far the most reliable. Even though many of Backblaze’s Hitachi drives are several years old, they only have an annual failure rate of 2% or so on average. And the latest HGST drives have a failure rate of just 1.4%. The “annual failure rate” is the chance of a drive dying within a 12-month period.