At this point, the natural reaction is to wonder what drives to get, and what brand to trust. You can find a lot of information within our article archives, but Western Digital, as far as typical off-the-shelf-at-Best-Buy drives go, seem to fare well. But those are sort of basic, and typically very slow. Backblaze, a backup company that currently stores over 1 exabyte of data. Western Digital, and Hitachi. But some drives are better than others even within those well-known brands. Does Backblaze do anything about 'Piracy?' I have some pirated stuff. A lot of older video games from the 90's that I did buy back then but long since lost the CD Keys and/or discs, a few obscure movies that are important to me, and games from Uplay when I realized I no longer wanted to keep the software for the 10 or so games I had there.

Signaling that 6TB hard drives are no longer for the exclusive enjoyment of expensive enterprise-level setups, online backup company Backblaze has crammed 45 6-terabyte drives into a single enclosure to create what we believe to be the highest-density storage pod ever created — 270 terabytes of spinning platter joy in a 4U rack-mount chassis. Better yet, if you have about $15,000 to hand and a penchant for computer building, you could even build your own 270TB storage pod — Backblaze open-sources its hardware designs, so you can simply follow along. But the question is, with both Seagate and Western Digital recently releasing consumer-grade 6TB drives, which one is better?

Earlier this year, we wrote about how Backblaze’s latest storage pod (Storage Pod 4.0) used 4TB drives to hit 180TB of RAID6 storage in a single 4U enclosure. Now, for a variety of reasons, Backblaze has begun to switch over to 6TB drives. Curiously, though, the company isn’t switching because 6TB drives are cheaper per-gig — 4TB drives are still about 30% cheaper in terms of cents-per-gigabyte. Backblaze isn’t even switching to 6TB drives because of increased overall storage density, or reduction in power consumption. No, it seems the main reason for switching to 6TB drives early is to find out whether Western Digital or Seagate make the most reliable drive — so that when 6TB drives do make economical sense (probably late this year), Backblaze can choose the best hard drive maker.

For this first foray into 6TB drives, Backblaze is using Western Digital drives — but sadly, just conventional five-platter drives, not the seven-platter helium-filled drives that WD/HGST released last year. Backblaze tells us the helium-filled drives, while ultra-desirable, are still priced at around $600 — too expensive to be economically viable. Backblaze opted for air-filled 6TB Western Digital Red drive — WD60EFRX, released just a few weeks ago — which can be yours for around $300. [Read: ExtremeTech’s backup master class.]

Backblaze Western Digital

The next pod will be made out of Seagate 6TB drives (model ST6000DX000, also priced at around $300). As far as we can tell, this is the consumer-grade version of the 6TB enterprise drive that Seagate released in April. Seagate doesn’t yet have access to hermetically sealed helium tech, and we’re also not sure if these drives contain five platters or six. Going by the manufacturers’ listed power specs for the drives, the Seagate drives use a lot more power, which would indicate that Western Digital is currently rocking higher areal density (and thus less platters and less power consumption). In a recent, rather defensive blog post, Seagate seems to deflect attention away from WD’s advances, saying that its own HAMR tech will allow it to release a 20TB hard drive by 2020.

Backblaze hopes that, by hopping on the 6TB band wagon now, it’ll be better positioned to buy a ton of drives when they finally break below the cost of 4TB drives (which are currently about $140 or 3.5 cents-per-gig). If either the WD or Seagate drives turn out to be lemons, Backblaze can save a lot of time, money, and hassle by opting for the more reliable drive. In business, a slightly larger up-front cost is usually pretty sensible if it saves you money down the road. Given the results of our previous story that looked at hard drive reliability, we wouldn’t be surprised if Western Digital produces the better 6TB drives — but we’ll have to wait and see. If you want to build your own 270TB Storage Pod, hit up the Backblaze website for blueprints and other useful details.

Backblaze Western Digital Download

The effects of the Thailand hard drive crisis of 2011, as plotted by our hard drive price watch series of posts

Another interesting factor that Backblaze points out is that hard drives nearly always follow the same path: They start off expensive, drop in price very rapidly, and then basically sit at the same price forever after (usually as production/focus shifts to the next drive). Backblaze says that 4TB drives are almost at the bottom of their curve, so you shouldn’t expect prices to fall much further than their current ~$150 price point — which means 6TB drives are about to begin their rapid descent into the realm of 4-cents-per-gig, and maybe below the mythical 3-cents-per-gig threshold, which has never yet been breached.

It looks as if Hitachi has the lowest failure rate (best reliability) among all tested hard drive manufacturers, with WD performing second best, and Seagate performing worse than both its competitors combined (... and multiplied, twice).

Backblaze reports that hard drives tend to fail at either the 18 month or post-3-year marks. This isn't too surprising and is in-line with components across the industry. Interestingly, Backblaze even issued warranty replacements as drives failed, then tested the received units on their bench. The company notes:

'The Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB drive, though, has not been doing well. We got them from Seagate as warranty replacements for the older drives, and these new drives are dropping like flies. Their average age shows 0.8 years, but since these are warranty replacements, we believe that they are refurbished drives that were returned by other customers and erased, so they already had some usage when we got them.'

Backblaze Western Digital Software

Backblaze also statistically analyzed the rate at which each company's drives died, noting a higher initial failure rate for WD than either Hitachi or Seagate, but better stability once burned-in.

With this data noted, it's generally a good idea to burn-in test your components upon receipt to ensure long-term reliability, as we've written before. For hard drives, using a tool like iometer or HD Tune (both with free versions) can help perform a burn-in test. Use one of these to root-out any rapidly-failing drives before committing important data to them.

Backblaze Western Digital Seagate

Read more of Backblaze's report here -- definitely interesting.

- Steve 'Lelldorianx' Burke.