Note that this report does not include information about SSDs, which will be published soon in a separate blog post. The good news: most of them are pretty dang reliable, regardless of capacity or manufacturer. Backblaze typically does this in a quarterly fashion, but since the year ended it decided to an annual wrap up of sorts for its hard drive army, and it is even sharing data from past years to see how things have changed over time. Individual models matter, more than brand loyalty IMO.Cloud backup provider Backblaze has collected all the data about which hard drives failed in its pods in 2021, providing a keen insight into what it sees are the most - and least - reliable hard drives. That was followed by an entertaining period of where I spent more time talking to IBM arranging RMAs and rebuilding the arrays than I did anything else. Despite being configured so that 2 drives could fail before I lost any data, both parity drives and 1 of the main drives failed before I had the RMA number for the 1st drive. At that point I made them into bookends it was the only safe way to use them in a data storage role )Īt work I had a RAID populated by IBM HGST Ultrastar SCSI drives in a 3+2 configuration. By the six month mark I'd had 8 different drives none of which successfully held data for more than a week. At home I had 2x IBM HGST Deskstar 60GXPs, both of which failed within 1 month, which they replaced under warranty with drives that either weren't even recognised by the BIOS, or died during formatting. #Backblaze hard drive reliability 2020 proIt's not a question of IF they will fall, but That's funny, when I was an IT pro I found HGST drives to be catastrophically unreliable. Also there are tools that can help you clone your drives too, and in some larger NAS systems (like 4+ bays) if you only use 2 bays, you can set up a second set of drives and copy the data over to those and then either keep the original 2 drives operating, or disable them and keep them as an extra backup somewhere. So replace your drives every few years (3-4 years) and make sure you have a backup somewhere else. They don't make drives like the used to (I had a Quantum hard drive that ran for about 9-10 years under normal use, but I've had newer WD and Seagate drives fail after a few years of normal use). They will work fine for 1-3 years but after that, you're asking for problems probably. Moving HDDs do wear out, and many consumer-level drives aren't designed to be on all the time. One thing I should put here for those running home NAS systems or if you just have a second drive in your computer, replace it about every 3 years. This data might not necessarily affect you if you aren’t a Backblaze user, but seeing drive failure rates from one of the largest cloud backup providers can help you better decide what drives might most be worth it for your personal storage solution, be it a single external hard drive or a dedicated RAID array. #Backblaze hard drive reliability 2020 zip fileYou can even download the raw data from Backblaze as a ZIP file with CSV files for each chart towards the bottom of the post. Backblaze says this reduction was a ‘group effort’ that ultimately saw all drives, new and old, small and large, perform well in 2020.īackblaze further contextualizes its 2020 data with confidence intervals for each specific drive model and further dives into what specific drives it added to its lineup in 2020 in its blog post. This decision ‘proved to be prophetic in 2020, as the effects of Covid-19 began to creep into the world economy in March 2020.’ Specifically, Backblaze says its decision to diversify helped to ‘manage supply chain through the manufacturing and shipping delays prevalent in the first several months of the pandemic.’Īs a whole, Backblaze’s annualized failure rates for 2020 was 0.93%, which is less than half the 1.89% annualized failure rate it incurred in 2019. Backblaze excluded 231 of its data drives from its data, as they ‘were either used for testing or did not have at least 60 drives of the same model at any time during the year.’ This means the following data is based on a total of 162,299 hard drives.Īs visible from the below graph, the Seagate 6TB drive (model: ST6000DX000) has the lowest annualized failure rate of just 0.23%, with HGST’s 4TB drive (model: HMS5C4040ALE640), 4TB drive (model: HMS5C4040BLE640), 8TB drive (model: HUH728080ALE600) and 12TB drive (model: HUH721212ALE600) not far behind with annualized failure rates of 0.27%, 0.27%, 0.29% and 0.31%, respectively.īackblaze says one of its goals going into 2020 was to diversify its hard drive lineup. Of those, 3,000 were boot drives, while the remaining 162,530 were data drives. Cloud-based backup company Backblaze has published its full-year 2020 hard drive stats, revealing just how many hard drives in its data centers have failed over the past calendar year.Īccording to Backblaze’s data, the company added 39,792 hard drives to its collection 2020, bringing the total to 165,530 drives.
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