Backblaze, one of the largest data storage cloud companies, has just revealed its yearly hard drive failure report, covering the data drives they use internally and with their partners and customers.
Backblaze reports hard drive failure over close to one decade of use to see the change over time
The company utilizes data drives from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital, with drive sizes ranging between 4TB to 16TB. At the beginning of 2022, we discussed the life expectancy of HDDs, with Western Digital being the favored company out of the same list as consumers. Backblaze revealed the statistics for the second quarter of 2022 of the 29 different drive models they employed in August. Seagate showed the most noticeable change out of the listed HDDs, but the yearly reviews show the changes over time.
Andrew Klien, the author of the recent analysis and Backblaze's Principal Cloud Storage Evangelist, notes that at the end of last year, the company was managing 235,608 drives, with 4,299 as boot drives and 231,309 as data drives. The boot drives are excluded from the report as consumers more commonly use the data drives. Of the 231,309 drives, 388 were also removed because the company had used them for internal testing or had less than 60 physical units. At the end of the year, 230,921 HDDs were analyzed over 2022 to see the failure rate.
The above chart shows Backblaze's hard drives' failure rates over a year. The company used twenty-nine different models again, with Seagate's 14TB drive (ST14000NM0138) having a failure rate average of 5.7% of the 1,519 drives in use. Interestingly, the Seagate failure rate for those drives had an average failure age (in months) of 24.8. The lowest percentage in hard drive failure was also from Seagate, with their 8TB hard drive (ST8000NM000A) with no losses over last year. There were 79 drives used from that model with the least amount of days in use. Backblaze notes that the 8TB Seagate drives were utilized as spare drives for any of the 8TB drives that did fail.
Two models had the most considerable amount of average days, with one from Seagate (6TB, ST6000DX000) and one from Toshiba (4TB, MD04ABA400V). Both had over 90 months on average and heightened failure rates between the two, even though Toshiba only had 94 drives in use and Seagate had 886. Seagate's impressive eight-year timespan with a less than 1% annual failure rate says a lot for the manufacturer, especially with almost eight times the number of drives.
Over the last three years, the average failure rate rose by 0.44%, which Backblaze attributed to the age of drives early in their report. However, the company breaks down the analysis further to see if that is the case for the increase in average failure rate, starting with drive size and failure.
The drives are split into two categories — one for drives 10TB and under in capacity and those for 12TB and above. The average failure rate in smaller drives increased by 0.85%, while the larger drives saw a 0.20% change. Backblaze notes that small drives account for 44.5% of overall drive failures compared to larger drives.
Taking the above graph, Backblaze converts the graph into two tables, with the first showing all drive sizes in average age (in months) and the lifetime average failure rate, or AFR. The second table consolidates the drives further with the older drives listed to show the increase in failure, which is more prominent in change from April 2013 to December 2022.
At the end of this part of the analysis, age was the cause of the increase in the failure rate of the company's current hard drives. In 2023, Backblaze anticipates replacing many older drives with larger hard drives, starting with 16TB and higher, which means that their smaller hard drives will be much less in service.
Regarding the manufacturer with the most significant drive failures, Seagate and Toshiba were close to even starting the first quarter of 2020. However, at the end of the fourth quarter of last year, Seagate had the most significant percentage of average failure. Seagate also is the oldest manufacturer that Backblaze utilizes in their drives, so the large quantity makes sense.
Does this mean Seagate drives have worsened over the years, and consumers should avoid them? No. Klien notes that several Seagate models are cost-effective and easy to replace over time. But those numbers may change if they use higher drive storage and phase out the older models.
The lifetime failure rate did decrease by 0.01% and 0.02% from the previous quarter. In fact, out of the 226,041 drives analyzed, there was a total of 333,011,602 drive days and an overall 12,722 drive failures.
News Source: Backblaze
