Backblaze has revealed 2017 Hard Drive reliability stats
Backblaze has revealed 2017 Hard Drive reliability stats
Computer users, who have ever looked into hard drive failure rates, have likely come across Backblaze. They use consumer hard drives to power its cloud storage service for customers and this allows the company to assess failure rates for different consumer drives at the end of each year.
Backblaze has recorded percentages for hard drive failures since 2013 deriving its stats from drives in its data centers. Over the last month, Backblaze has had a chance to sum up its 2017 results revealing annualized failure rates for drives from all major HDD makers over the last year.
At the end of 2017, Backblaze had 93,240 spinning hard drives, including 1,935 boot drives and 91,305 data drives. The company revealed the hard drive statistics of the data drives they monitor removing from consideration those drives which were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which they did not have at least 45 drives. This leaves them with 91,243 hard drives.
The stats results show that hard drive failures have decreased year-on-year since 2015. Sample size has also doubled in the last three years, making results more comprehensive. Backblaze had 45,566 drives in 2015 and observed a failure rate of 2.35 percent across the board, a number that includes drives from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi and Western Digital. In 2017, Backblaze collected results for 91,243 drives, with a failure rate of 1.83 percent across the entire range.
According to Backblaze, the failure rates for Seagate and Western Digital's 6TB hard drive models have decreased, over the years while the number of drives has stayed fairly consistent from year to year.
HGST's 8TB hard drive had a 0 percent failure rate over 2016 and 2017, whereas 4.93 percent of them failed in 2015. However, only 45 of these drives were in operation over those three years, so this particular statistic isn't all that useful. The same can be said for Western Digital's 3TB hard drive. The number of failures has decreased from 7.81 percent in 2015 to 1.09 percent in 2017, but the number of drives in use has also dropped from 1,046 to just 180. Last year, Backblaze replaced 1,508 hard drives, having an average of 4.13 HDD failures per day.
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