Storage business is gradually shifting from mechanical hard disks (HDD) to solid state drives (SSD), but in many application scenarios, HDD is still the best solution.
Backblaze recently counted 245,757 mechanical hard drives and solid state drives used in its global data centers, 4,460 for the boot disk, of which 3,144 are SSDs and 1,316 are HDDs.
Backblaze said it monitored 241,297 hard drives in its data centers through the end of Q2 2023.
After excluding 357 drives used for testing and some models with single-digit sample sizes, a total of 240,940 drives were counted in the table and categorized into 31 model groups to provide annual failure rate (AFR) data.
Six drive models performed perfectly in Q2 2023, but three of them were too few to be statistically significant.
The oldest working storage drive in the Backblaze lineup is the 4 TB Seagate ST 4000 DM 000, which lasted 105.2 months (8.8 years) without a failure, but the oldest working hard drive winner is the 500 GB Lifetime WDC WD 5000 BPKT boot drive at 122 months (10.2 years).
The AFR was 1.54% in Q1 and rose to 2.28% in Q2. Of course, quarterly AFRs can fluctuate, but they can also reflect trends that are worth examining further.
Broken down by capacity, the report shows that 8TB and 10TB models have the highest failure rates.
A link to the report, interested users can read in-depth.
