Thursday, February 3rd 2022
Backblaze Announces 2021 Hard Drive Failure Rates
Backblaze, a cloud storage provider has recently released their latest annual report on the performance of their 202,759 hard disks in operation. The company operates drives of various capacities and ages from Seagate, Toshiba, HGST, and WDC monitoring each models annualized failure rate (AFR). The latest report shows that the AFR for all drives in operation rose to 1.01% in 2021 up from 0.93% in 2020 but significantly below the 1.83% reported in 2019. The larger capacity newer drives are primarily responsible for this figure with them accounting for 69% of total active drives but only 57% of drive failures.
The most reliable drive operated by Backblaze remains the 6 TB Seagate ST6000DX000 with an AFR of just 0.11% while having an average age of 80.4 months. The least reliable drive is also from Seagate with the 14 TB ST14000NM0138 having an AFR of 4.66% in Q4 2021 down from 6.29% in Q3 2021. While these statistics cannot be used to reliably judge the quality of drives from any particular manufacturer they serve as a good reference for general trends in hard drive reliability.
Source:
Backblaze
The most reliable drive operated by Backblaze remains the 6 TB Seagate ST6000DX000 with an AFR of just 0.11% while having an average age of 80.4 months. The least reliable drive is also from Seagate with the 14 TB ST14000NM0138 having an AFR of 4.66% in Q4 2021 down from 6.29% in Q3 2021. While these statistics cannot be used to reliably judge the quality of drives from any particular manufacturer they serve as a good reference for general trends in hard drive reliability.
19 Comments on Backblaze Announces 2021 Hard Drive Failure Rates
Btw - HGST and Toshiba is owned by WD, or they corporates.....
HGST is almost impossible to buy from what i remember... so seagate is only option really. or WD
So they are mainly for companies
all wd drives backblaze's currently using are rebranded (ex-) hgsts. you can see that from the model numbers.
"As part of the deal, Western Digital agreed to trade assets with Toshiba, with Toshiba receiving assets for the production of 3.5-inch hard drives (1, 2 and 3-platter drives produced in Shenzhen, China), in exchange for a Toshiba factory in Thailand for producing 2.5-inch drives (which had been inactive since the 2011 floods).[6]"
HGST is owned by Western Digital and for the most part has been integrated into Western Digital's product line.
"In October 2015, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce issued a decision allowing Western Digital to begin integrating HGST into its main business. WD was required to maintain the HGST brand and sale team for at least two more years.[9] Since then, first WD-branded products left HGST's plant at 304 Industrial Park in Prachinburi Province, Thailand; in reverse, certain HGST-branded products became produced at Western Digital's plants in Bang Pa-in District, Ayutthaya Province, Thailand and Penang, Malaysia. In 2018, Western Digital announced that it was phasing out its HGST brand and that all of its remaining product lines (particularly Ultrastar) will henceforth be marketed as brands of Western Digital.[10][11]"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST
Are you seriously trying to tell me I should blacklist a brand because I am worst case say 5% more likely to experience a failure?
No I am not saying it's margin of error. I am saying the data is of limited utility. I'd take whatever is cheaper, frankly.
Myself, I run enterprise drives.