
“So, are we worried about the increase in drive failure rates? No, but we are not arrogant either. As part of our preparation, we use our drive stats data as one of the many inputs into understanding our environment so we can adjust when and as we need,” wrote Andy Klein, principal cloud storage storyteller at Backblaze, in a blog post about the most recent quarterly drive stats. If you are not prepared for that, you will fail. Over the years, we have seen a wide range of failure rates across different manufacturers, drive models, and drive sizes. “Of course we’d like to see them lower, but the inescapable reality of the cloud storage business is that drives fail. Aside from the one 8TB drive, Toshiba’s drives performed well and never rose above 2% AFR.īackblaze notes that failures are a fact of life in cloud storage: Western Digital’s failure rates never rose above 1% AFR. Seagate logged pretty bad failure rates overall it accounts for the bulk of Backblaze’s inventory and thus its failures. The worst offenders were a Toshiba 8TB drive with a 19.63% AFR a Seagate 14TB drive with a 14.28% AFR an HGST 8TB drive with a 13.53% AFR a Seagate 10TB drive with a 12.31% AFR and a second Seagate 14TB drive with a 10.25% AFR. The company noted that 8TB and 10TB drives were throwing off the numbers.


But the failures didn’t occur across the board. In the second quarter of 2023, the firm reported an average failure rate (AFR) of 2.28%, which is a sizable increase from 1.54% in the previous quarter. (In recent quarters, Backblaze has added SSD performance to its measurements, but SSDs are still early in their deployment lifecycle, so patterns over time have yet to fully emerge.) The company currently has a massive inventory of 241,297 hard disk drives of varying capacities and from various brands. The latest quarterly report from Backblaze on hard drive reliability reveals a rise in failures among certain drives.īackblaze is a pure storage provider cloud storage is all they do, and they dig deep into the statistics of hard drive failure and share their data with the industry.
