Following last week’s mechanical hard drive (HDD) life expectancy report, the company Backblaze today released another mechanical HDD failure rate report for the 2nd quarter of the year. In the report, mechanical HDDs including Seagate, HGST (now owned by Western Digital after its acquisition) and Toshiba are investigated in depth.
As of 2Q2022, Backblaze has inspected 219,444 mechanical and solid state drives in its data centers around the world. Based on the analysis, 4,020 of these were used for boot drives, including 2,558 solid state drives and 1,462 mechanical drives. In its latest report, Backblaze focuses on data drives that have been brought into management (215,424) and evaluate the failure rate of these drives on a quarterly basis.
In the first part of the analysis report are the failed mechanical drives that are no longer available for use. backblaze indicates that a total of 413 mechanical drives were removed during the quarter. The number of drives removed at the end of the test, as well as drive models that could not sustain a maximum of 60 drives, were not included in this data. The final total number of mechanical drives analyzed was 215,011, for a total of 27 models.
Some of the observations Backblaze noted in their study were that “the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) for all drives listed above was 1.39%. This is the same as the previous quarter and down from 1.45% a year ago (June 30, 2021).
The report states that based on the AFR shows that the following 3 mechanical drives had the highest failure rates out of the 27 drives tested.
● 8TB HGST (model: HUH728080ALE604) at 6.26%.
● Seagate 14TB (model: ST14000NM0138) was 4.86%.
● Toshiba 16TB (Model: MG08ACA16TA) is 3.57%.
The reason the AFR is particularly high for the 3 mechanical drives mentioned above is that they have a limited sample size compared to other drives. This means that these drive models have a relatively large range of confidence intervals and that three drive models have lower reliability in this analysis.
In the icons below, Backblaze has removed those drive models with larger confidence ranges and listed only the drive models that are more reliable for all consumers.
The following figure shows the complete results of this analysis.
