Backblaze Publishes Q1 2023 Hard Drive Failure Rate Report, 2-3 Year Average Life Expectancy

wccftech.com:

Backblaze has supplied the newest update to their Hard Drive Failure Rates statistics which covers the first quarter of 2023 & includes both client storage drives and backup drives. This new report covers 237,278 data drives in use.

In the first quarter of this year, the company tracked 237,278 drives that are used to hold client data. From those drives, 385 were removed as they were the only drives used for testing or low-in-quantity drives. The final count of drives monitored for this analysis is 236,893. Those drives are grouped into thirty models that were analyzed.

The AFR, or annualized failure rate, for the first quarter this year was 1.54%, which increased by .33% from the previous quarter. Andy Klein, Backblaze's author of the report, notes that the AFR quarterly numbers "can be volatile" but can also be helpful to see if a trend appears in the future.

For instance, HGST (model HUH721212ALN604), Seagate (ST12000NM0007), and Western Digital (WDC, model WUH721414ALE6L4) all had a substantial AFR increase, with the first company seeing 246%, the second 138%, and WDC seeing 242% AFR quarterly increases. All three drives are 12 TB in size or above.

Two drives saw zero failures: the 16 TB Seagate ST16000NM002J & the 8 TB ST8000NM000A. Those drives were less than 50,000 drive days old, so no data exists to form a full analysis. However, the Toshiba 8 TB HDWF180 replaced 187 8TB drives from the previous quarter, so those are now making a list for future analysis.

The company is phasing out smaller capacity drives, such as their 6 and 10-TB drives, which only have a single model for each. The drive days for the 6 TB drives are 79,651, while the 10 TB drives are at 105,443. The remaining drives have 2.2 million drive days or