Gaming PC

Backup Company Reveals Hard Drive Failure Rates For 2022

Cloud storage and data backup company back blaze (opens in new tab) has published its 2022 Annual Report on Hard Drive Failures. Many consumers today may already be using one of the best SSDs on the market. However, when it comes to secondary storage, hard drives are still important. Statistics show which hard drives are the most reliable given the nature of the company’s business.

Backblaze has some insight into which hard drives are the most durable storage devices. According to the company, there are 235,608 hard drives as of December 2022. Of the entire lot, 4,299 were boot drives and the remaining 231,309 were data drives. Backblaze’s results focus on the latter. The company removed 388 drives from the report because they are test drives or models with a sample size of less than 60 drives. This leaves Backblaze with 230,921 hard drives for analysis.

Seagate’s Exos 8TB (ST8000NM000A) was the star of the report. According to the numbers, hard drives showed zero failures in 2022. However, the problem lies in the details. Backblaze says he only has 79 drives in action, so the sample size is small compared to other models that total in the tens of thousands. Additionally, the Seagate 8TB drive has only been used for 22,839 days and is mostly used as a spare drive to replace his failed 8TB drive.

The annual failure rate (AFR) of hard drives has increased over the past three years. Backblaze, for example, posted an AFR of 0.93% in 2020 and 1.10% in 2021. In 2022, the AFR was up to 1.37%. The main reason for the increase is due to drive age. Like any other piece of hardware, hard drives are more prone to failure as they age.

At first glance, HGST Ultrastar He8 8TB (HUH728080ALE604) and Seagate Exos X14 14TB (ST14000NM0138) have the highest failure rates at 5.27% and 5.70% respectively. Note that the two models have significantly less drives and days driven than the other models.

Hard drives with a capacity of 10 TB or less saw an overall increase in failures of 0.85% from 2021 to 2022. Notably, his AFR in 2022 was highest for his 10 TB drive (3.73%). % gain. The 16 TB drives are the only drives with degraded AFR. Smaller drives (4 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB, and 10 TB) account for 44.5% of drive failures in 2022, according to Backblaze. Smaller drives are failing more often due to longer uptime.

Backblaze data confirms a correlation between drive age and drive failure. The older the drive, the more likely it is to fail. For example, a 4 TB drive with an average age of 81.1 months has an AFR of 1.70%, while an 8 TB drive with an average age of 67.8 months has an AFR of 1.36%. By comparison, a 16 TB drive, 13.3 months, a total of up to 0.86%. Backblaze emphasized the small sample size of 6TB and 10TB drives. Additionally, their driving days are getting shorter. The AFR of the 6TB group is 0.89% and the AFR of the 10TB group is 1.68%.

Looking at drive failures by manufacturer, Backblaze says Seagate leads, with Toshiba in second place. That’s not to say Seagate hard drives are unreliable. On the contrary, the company’s Seagate drives are significantly older than other vendors. Additionally, Backblaze explains that while Seagate drives are generally cheaper, they have a higher failure rate in operating environments. That said, the failure rate isn’t so significant that extending the life of the drive turns it into a less cost-effective option.

Finally, Backblaze looked at the longevity AFR of their drives. The lifetime AFR is now 1.39%. This is an improvement over last year’s 1.40% compared to the previous quarter when the value was 1.41%. The most notable model is Seagate’s Barracuda 4TB (ST4000DM000) drive, which has a lifetime AFR of 2.54% and he has accumulated over 73 million drive days.

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