![]() ![]() If they survive past a year, there’s a good chance that they’ll make it the expected lifespan.īackblaze considers it a hard drive failure when the drive will no longer spin or connect to the computer’s operating system, will not sync with other disks, or displays signs highly correlated with imminent failure. Hard drives usually fail at the beginning of their lifetimes or at around 4 years old. Gleb Budman, Backblaze’s CEO, describes the way hard drives fail as a bathtub curve. Backblaze says they’d like to order more of these, but the company isn’t able to take orders that large. HGST’s drives also fail at a decreasing rate year over year, with a rate just over one percent. The drives least likely to fail were made by HGST, a hard drive company owned by Western Digital that isn’t targeted at a consumer market. In terms of the hard drives that are most likely to fail, Backblaze’s data outs Western Digital, which had a 2016 failure rate of 6.55 percent. (It’s also worth noting that the sample size in 2016 also doubled from 18,017 drives to 36,863 drives.) The largest improvement was by Seagate between 20, where the rate of failures dropped from 10.68 percent to 3.48 percent, more than half. Year over year, the failure rate decreases. This isn’t a sweeping investigation of every hard drive manufacturer on the market, but the independent data of one company that buys hard drives in bulk, and buys from the biggest players in the market.Īt first glance, hard drive technology seems to be improving. The company’s latest analysis of more than 60,000 hard drives details which brands of drive fail with greater frequency. The shelf life for the average drive is about four years, according to research by data storage company Backblaze. When looking at the average age of drive failure by model, Backblaze reduced the model count to 30, eliminating drives with fewer than 50 failures.We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. "Given we are always adding additional failed drives to our dataset, and retiring drive models along the way, we will continue to track the average failed age of our drive models and report back if we find anything interesting." We were surprised by what our data told us, but a little math never hurt anyone," Backblaze's blog says. "When we first saw the Secure Data Recovery average failed age, we thought that 2 years and 10 months was too low. This is despite Backblaze currently using HDDs that are older than 2 years and 7 months. If Backblaze only looked at drives that it didn't use in its data centers anymore, there would be 3,379 drives across 35 models, and the average age of failure would be a bit longer at 2 years and 7 months.īackblaze said its results thus far "are consistent" with Secure Data Recovery's March findings. The 17,155 drives examined include 72 different models and does not include failed boot drives, drives that had no SMART raw attribute data, or drives with out-of-bounds data. The company recorded each drive's failure date, model, serial number, capacity, failure, and SMART raw value. 16TB Western Digital (WUH721816ALE6L0): These drives have only been installed for three months, but no failures in 624 drives is a great start. 2 years, 6 monthsīackblaze arrived at this age by examining all of its failed drives and their respective power-on hours. After recording a quarterly high of five failures last quarter, they are back on track with zero failures this quarter and a lifetime failure rate of 0.41. Among the 17,155 failed HDDs Backblaze examined, the average age at which the drives failed was 2 years and 6 months. Today, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company with a reputation for detailed HDD and SSD failure analysis, followed up Secure Data Recovery's report with its own research using a much larger data set. That seemed like a short life span, but considering the limited sample size and analysis in Secure Data Recovery's report, there was room for skepticism. It found the average time before failure among those drives to be 2 years and 10 months. ![]() We recently covered a study by Secure Data Recovery, an HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery company, of 2,007 defective hard disk drives it received. ![]()
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