Backblaze Releases Q2 2023 HDD Stats, Annual Failure Rates Witnesses An Increase

wccftech.com:

Backblaze, one of the largest cloud storage companies, has released its quarterly HDD stats, which cover crucial aspects such as failure rate. The results obtained are through detailed testing with a huge sampling size.

The total HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) tested by the company reached an astonishing 241,297 hard drives. The actual number was a bit higher than this since the company removed 357 drives as they were utilized for testing. The data compiled accounts for a total of 240,940 hard drives arranged in 31 different groups depending upon manufacturer and results obtained.

Analyzing the results, it can be seen that the AFR (annualized failure rate) for this quarter was 2.28%, which is a noticeable jump from the previous quarter's AFR of 1.54%. While the author expresses AFR results as "volatile", the increase has also put the company in doubt. The upwards trend of AFR is mainly due to the aging drives since the higher storage ones such as the 8TB and 10TB HDDs aren't holding up to expectations.

Diving into the interesting bits, Backblaze mentions that the oldest average drive they have up and running is a 6TB Seagate (model: ST6000DX000) which has an uptime of 8.2 years. The oldest operational drive is the 4TB Seagate (model: ST4000DM000), reaching 8.8 years. Moreover, when it comes to zero failures, Backblaze identified several models from companies like Seagate and Toshiba, running at least 50,000 drive dates, before reaching the "zero failure" milestone.

We mentioned earlier that the 8TB and 10TB drives were the main culprits behind the massive quarterly AFR hike. Backblaze analyzed the Lifetime AFR to support the claim, seeing that it has also experienced an increase of 0.05%. Through its testing, the company found that