Backblaze hard drive failure rates12/2/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() For specific numbers, Backblaze says that large drives “total 66% of the drive days total, while only producing 57% of the drive failures. That could point to problems for the average consumer, who is less likely to need a drive above 12TB in capacity, but it’s also worth pointing out that Backblaze’s larger drives were also newer. Overall, failure rates were low, with an average AFR of 1.01% across all drives, although smaller drives (those below 12TB) made up the majority of issues. What does this all mean for hard drive storage in 2021 overall? Similarly, its 16TB Toshiba additions are also off to a strong start. Specifically, the 16TB WDC drive collection it added this year has only been in the fleet for an average of 5.06 months but has a low AFR of 0.14%. While Backblaze’s oldest drive was also its most stable, the company’s data also suggests that newer drives are holding up well. Regardless, if you’re curious, the formula for calculating AFR is as follows: AFR = (drive failures / (drive days/365)) * 100. This, overall, provides a more accurate picture, making sure that new, unfailing drives added in Q4 don’t make a model look more reliable than it otherwise might have. Its data sheets refer to these with a term called “AFR,” which stands for “annualized failure rate.” This is slightly different from “annual failure rate,” in that it adjusts the data to account for drives which were added to or removed from the fleet partway through the year. Overall, Western Digital does well by having a maximum AFR of 0.43 per cent.Before we move on, it’s important to address how Backblaze counts failure rates. It is actually more important to select a particular model than brand, as Seagate ably demonstrates with AFRs of 0.11 and 4.79 per cent on two families. In the end, keep in mind this is not an indication of the general reliability of any specific brand, but it gives us an overview of how different capacities and technologies fare against one another. Backblaze mentioned that 19 drives of this model that failed in Q4 were shipped off for further analysis, and that it’s continuing to follow this process over the coming quarters. On the opposite side there is the 14TB Seagate ‘ST14000NM0138’, which has an AFR of 4.66 per cent in Q4 of 2021, down from 6.29 per cent in the previous quarter. Perhaps the comparatively limited quantity of just 886 helps in this regard. Seagate’s 6TB ‘ST6000DX000’ is still the most reliable drive in the arsenal, with an AFR of only 0.11%, even though they are 80.4 months old on average. ![]() In other words, newer drives are less likely to fail than older ones, which stands to reason. This is thanks to new high-capacity drives that account for 69 per cent of Backblaze‘s active catalogue, whilst only contributing to 57 per cent of the overall failure rate. ![]() Nowadays, many consumers are already likely using one of the best SSDs on the. The report indicates that AFR for all operational drives rose to 1.01 per cent in 2021, up from 0.93 per cent in 2020, although still below the 1.83 per cent of 2019. Cloud storage and data backup company Backblaze has published its annual report of hard drive failures for 2022. The major takeaway from the analysis is that the annualized failure rate for all 203,759 hard drive it examined was just 1. Being mechanical spinners by nature, SSDs are not taken into account. This report is important as it provides a glimpse into the reliability of hard drives, pitting one manufacturer against another, and Backblaze goes further by breaking down each model into capacity, the number of drives examined, average age, and most importantly, failure. Here’s the lifetime chart from our most recent Q3 2018 report. As many of you know, each quarter Backblaze publishes our Hard Drive Stats report for the hard drives in our data centers. The company uses drives of multiple capacities and ages, from brands such as Seagate, Toshiba, HGST, and WDC, while monitoring each model’s annualised failure rate or AFR, calculated using the following formula. Similar annualized failure rates as enterprise drives Uses less power and produces less heat Hard Drive Failure Rates. Backblaze, the cloud storage provider, recently published its 2021 annual report about the performance of 202,759 operational hard drives. ![]()
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