At the company's HDD Reimagine event today, Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) introduced a new flash-enhanced drive architecture that breaks traditional boundaries of storage. Building on the company's unique ability to innovate with HDD and flash, the new storage architecture with OptiNAND technology optimizes and integrates HDDs with iNAND embedded flash drives. This gives customers - like hyperscale cloud, CSPs, enterprises, smart video surveillance partners, NAS suppliers and more - a solution to meet the exponential growth in data creation by delivering the capacity, performance and reliability needed to store vast amounts of data today and well into the future.

Leveraging industry-first technologies including triple-stage actuator (TSA) and HelioSeal technology, the first products featuring the new drive architecture will deliver an unsurpassed 2.2 TB per platter, extending capacities gains on proven ePMR technology. Setting a new industry milestone, Western Digital has shipped samples of new nine-disk, 20 TB ePMR flash-enhanced drives with OptiNAND technology to select customers.

As of June 30, 2020, Backblaze had 142,630 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,271 boot drives and 140,059 data drives. This review looks at the Q2 2020 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way. As always, we look forward to your comments.

Quarterly Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q2 2020
At the end of Q2 2020, Backblaze was using 140,059 hard drives to store customer data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 139,867 hard drives in our review. The table below covers what happened in Q2 2020.

As of March 31, 2020, Backblaze had 132,339 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across four data centers. Of that number, there were 2,380 boot drives and 129,959 data drives. This review looks at the Q1 2020 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way. In addition, near the end of the post, we review a few 2019 predictions we posed a year ago. As always, we look forward to your comments.
Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q1 2020

At the end of Q1 2020, Backblaze was using 129,959 hard drives to store customer data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives that were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 129,764 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q1 2020.

As of March 31, 2019, Backblaze had 106,238 spinning hard drives in our cloud storage ecosystem spread across three data centers. Of that number, there were 1,913 boot drives and 104,325 data drives. This review looks at the Q1 2019 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers and provides a handful of insights and observations along the way.

Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q1 2019
At the end of Q1 2019, Backblaze was using 104,325 hard drives to store data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives that were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 104,130 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q1 2019.

As of September 30, 2018 Backblaze had 99,636 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,866 boot drives and 97,770 data drives. This review looks at the quarterly and lifetime statistics for the data drive models in operation in our data centers. In addition, we'll say goodbye to the last of our 3TB drives, hello to our new 12TB HGST drives, and we'll explain how we have 584 fewer drives than last quarter, but have added over 40 petabytes of storage.

Hard Drive Reliability Statistics for Q3 2018
At the end of Q3 2018, Backblaze was monitoring 97,770 hard drives used to store data. For our evaluation, we remove from consideration those drives that were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives (see why below). This leaves us with 97,600 hard drives. The table below covers what happened in Q3 2018.

Overview
At the end of 2017 we had 93,240 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,935 boot drives and 91,305 data drives. This post looks at the hard drive statistics of the data drives we monitor. We'll review the stats for Q4 2017, all of 2017, and the lifetime statistics for all of the drives Backblaze has used in our cloud storage data centers since we started keeping track.

Hard Drive Reliability Statistics for Q4 2017
At the end of Q4 2017 Backblaze was monitoring 91,305 hard drives used to store data. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives which were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives (read why after the chart). This leaves us with 91,243 hard drives. The table below is for the period of Q4 2017.

Western Digital Corp., a global data storage technology and solutions leader, today announced that it is providing cloud and hyperscale data centers the capacity required by big data applications with the world's first 14TB enterprise-class hard drive featuring host-managed shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. Western Digital's HGST-branded Ultrastar Hs14 delivers 40 percent more capacity and more than twice the sequential write performance of its SMR predecessor, enabling more economical and efficient capture of the growing volume and variety of data.

The future is built on the insights and predictive power of big data. As data grows exponentially, storing it all in an affordable and accessible manner is an ongoing challenge for enterprise and cloud service data center operators. With a focus on total cost of ownership (TCO), the factors of capacity per rack, power consumption, cooling, maintenance, and acquisition cost are all paramount. To combat the big data challenge, Ultrastar Hs14 drives deliver unprecedented capacity leadership and online watt/TB power efficiency for extremely low TCO by harnessing two core complimentary technologies - fourth generation HelioSeal technology, and second generation host-managed SMR - along with enterprise-class reliability.

Western Digital Corp., a global data storage technology and solutions leader, today announced the HGST-branded Ultrastar SS300, the company's highest-performing SAS SSD to date. It is the latest addition to the company's family of Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, which are used to meet the rigorous data demands of many of the world's largest companies today. Developed in partnership with Intel, the new Ultrastar SS300 delivers best-in-class random performance, offering speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS random read and up to 200,000 IOPS random write.

"Today, we raise the bar with our newest 12 Gb/s SAS SSD, the Ultrastar SS300," said Ulrich Hansen, vice president of SSD product marketing at Western Digital. "Built with high-endurance 3D NAND flash memory, the Ultrastar SS300 offers best-in-class speed, outstanding capacity and intelligent power options that enable customers to tailor storage systems and server solutions that are just right for their demanding needs. These benefits are delivered with the same tremendous reliability that has helped to make Ultrastar 12 Gb/s SAS SSDs popular around the globe."

Western Digital Corp. today announced that it has begun shipping its fourth-generation helium-based hard drive with its 12TB HGST-branded Ultrastar He12 hard drive. The Ultrastar He12 12TB hard drive is the next generation of the company's award-winning high capacity enterprise-class drive with HelioSeal technology, providing customers with a data storage solution addressing the expansive information management needs and demanding performance requirements of today's enterprise, cloud and hyperscale workloads.

"We have again raised the bar in enterprise storage with the industry's most advanced and cost-effective highest capacity helium HDD storage solutions," said Mark Grace, senior vice president of devices at Western Digital. "The Ultrastar He12 hard drive advances Western Digital's portfolio leveraging the HelioSeal platform to deliver industry-leading high capacity HDD storage with exceptional power efficiency. Western Digital has shipped over 15M helium-based high capacity drives to date and continues to support our customers with outstanding reliability and Quality of Service (QoS). Our industry-leading data center portfolio enables customers across the spectrum to meet their evolving and dynamic data center demand."

Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC), a global storage technology and solutions leader, today announced upgrades to its award-winning G-Technology product lines, including the addition of Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C connectivity technologies. The upgrades optimize the speed and performance of these drives, meeting the growing needs of creative professionals who are capturing and transferring vast amounts of high-resolution content.

"G-Technology recognizes the need for a complete workflow solution that takes advantage of the power of Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C," said Sven Rathjen, vice president of marketing, Client Solutions, Western Digital. "The result is a substantial upgrade across several product lines that delivers reliable, fast, and easy-to-use storage solutions to fit the current and future needs of our customers."

Backblaze has just revealed their HDD failure rates statistics, with updates regarding 2016's Q4 and full-year analysis. These 2016 results join the company's statistics, which started being collected and collated in April 2013, to shed some light on the most - and least reliable - manufacturers. A total of 1,225 drives failed in 2016, which means the drive failure rate for 2016 was just 1.95 percent, a improving over the 2.47 percent that died in 2015 and miles below the 6.39 percent that hit the garbage bin in 2014.

Organizing 2016's failure rates by drive size, independent of manufacturer, we see that 3 TB hard drives are the most reliable (with 1,40% failure rates), with 5 TB hard drives being the least reliable (at a 2,22% failure rate). When we organize the drives by manufacturer, HGST, which powers 34% (24,545) of the total drives (71,939), claims the reliability crown, with a measly 0,60% failure rate, and WDC bringing up the rear on reliability terms, with an average 3,88% failure rate, while simultaneously being one of the least represented manufacturers, with only 1,626 HDDs being used from the manufacturer.

Western Digital Corp. today further expanded its data center SSD and HDD portfolio with the introduction of next-generation storage solutions designed to help IT managers address the intensive data and extreme performance demands of today's enterprise, cloud and hyperscale workloads.

The new solutions include the blazingly fast HGST-branded Ultrastar SN200 NVMe-compatible PCIe solid-state drive (SSD) series, which offers class-leading random read performance of up to 1.2 million IOPS in key workloads, and the company's fastest and highest capacity SAS SSD to date, the HGST-branded Ultrastar SS200 Series SSD. The company also introduced its fourth-generation helium-based HelioSeal enterprise-class hard disk drive (HDD), the 12TB HGST-branded Ultrastar He12 drive. Additionally, the company announced it will extend the He12 platform to 14TB, leveraging Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR).

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that its popular HGST-branded Ultrastar SN150 PCI Express (PCIe) NVMe solid state drive (SSD) is now certified for use with VMware Virtual SAN and vSphere. Optimized for easy set-up, the Ultrastar SN150 SSD for VMWare environments reduces latency, and brings hyperscale-level performance and enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) time to virtualized servers and cloud storage. This can significantly lower the total cost of ownership of VMware storage environments over traditional storage architectures by reducing performance tuning and field support costs. In server-side environments where VMware virtualization management is utilized, the Ultrastar SN150 is an ideal option for data center managers building or deploying systems on VMware Virtual SAN or vSphere.

Part of Western Digital's HGST-branded Ultrastar data center storage solutions family, the certified Ultrastar SN150 is available in a low-profile, half-height, half-length (HHHL), add-in card form factor and is one of the first NVMe SSDs in the industry to utilize VMware's in-box NVMe driver. For data center administrators, this helps eliminate the hassle of time-consuming downloads and configurations, and allows faster deployment. The Ultrastar SN150 drive is available in capacities ranging from 1120GB1 to 3820GB and offers speeds which exceed Virtual SAN's highest performance class (Class F) specifications, enabling it to easily address the heaviest data workloads in a variety of virtualized server and storage configurations, including all-flash and hybrid configurations utilizing flash for caching and hard disk drives for storage capacity.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced the appointment of Mark Long to oversee the company's finance organization as executive vice president, finance, in addition to his role as chief strategy officer. Long will succeed Olivier Leonetti as chief financial officer on Sept. 1, 2016. Leonetti is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities but will continue as CFO through Sept. 1, 2016, reporting to CEO Steve Milligan, and will oversee the completion of the company's fiscal year-end reporting requirements. He will continue in an advisory role to the CEO through Oct. 1, 2016.

"The company is going through a strategic and organizational transformation with the integration of our HGST and WD subsidiaries as well as integrating the recently completed acquisition of SanDisk," said Milligan. "Although in the early stages, we are already seeing the benefits of these strategic steps. As we build on our strategy-driven focus in a tightly integrated manner, it is the right time to combine the strategy and finance organizations and Mark Long is the right leader of this integrated team, with his extensive experience in financial and strategic planning. Olivier Leonetti has made a tremendous contribution to Western Digital in nearly two years as CFO. He played a key role through the successful planning, financing and completion of the SanDisk acquisition. The company is grateful for his contribution and his continued stewardship of our finances through the fiscal year-end reporting process."

G-Technology, a leader in delivering premium storage solutions, today announced four new products in its Evolution Series, a flexible ecosystem of docking stations and interchangeable and expandable external hard drives and accessories that makes transferring, editing and distributing content more efficient, scalable and reliable. The new products include the G-SPEED Studio XL with two ev Series Bay Adapters, ev Series Reader RED MINI-MAG Edition, G-DOCK ev Solo and the ev Series FireWire Adapter. Designed with creative professionals in mind, the new Evolution Series products provide the ultimate flexibility and customization for all workflows.

The G-SPEED Studio XL with two ev Series Bay Adapters is a flexible, eight-bay Thunderbolt 2 storage solution, which comes with six enterprise-class hard drives and two integrated ev Series Bay Adapters. It offers professional content creators colossal capacity and huge performance. The integrated ev Series Bay Adapters accommodate all ev Series drive modules, enabling cross-functionality with the Evolution Series for enhanced workflow and productivity. Configurable in RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, & 10, it supports multi-stream compressed 4K workflows with extremely large volumes of data at transfer rates of up to 1,200MB/sec and has the ability to daisy-chain via dual Thunderbolt 2 ports. Complete with a three-year limited warranty and sleek black enclosure, this modular, enterprise-class solution provides optimal storage for demanding workflows. The G-SPEED STUDIO XL with two ev Series Bay Adapters will be available in October. Manufacturer's suggested retail pricing for 18TB is $2,799.95, 24TB is $2,999.95, 36TB is $3,999.95 and 48TB is $4,999.95.

Helping the world harness the power of data, HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC) today announced the first enterprise-class 10TB (terabyte) hard disk drive (HDD) for next-generation active archive applications. The host-managed Ultrastar Archive Ha10 SMR HDD sets a new standard in enabling the world's densest server and storage systems with unprecedented TCO levels. This industry-defining product is the result of combining two complementary technologies - HGST's second generation, field-proven HelioSeal platform and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) - to deliver unmatched storage density and power efficiency, without compromising reliability and performance predictability. With an industry-leading 10TB capacity, the Ultrastar Archive Ha10 gives customers a time-to-market capacity advantage for archival environments and applications where data is sequentially written and randomly read, such as social media, cloud storage, online backup, life sciences as well as media and entertainment.

HGST recognizes SMR as core technology necessary in driving areal density increases. By overlapping or "shingling" the data tracks on top of each other, higher areal density can be achieved within the same physical footprint. Based on feedback from customers whose data center environments demand predictable performance and control of how data is handled, HGST has implemented a host-managed SMR solution. The sequential write behavior of host-managed SMR complements active archive workloads.

Helping the world harness the power of data, HGST, a Western Digital company, today announced it is shipping its NVMe compliant Ultrastar SN100 Series PCIe SSDs - the industry's highest-performing NVMe compliant SSDs. Ideally suited for mission-critical data center workloads, including scale-out databases powering today's largest online and cloud services, the HGST SN100 series enables businesses to achieve a better return on their data center infrastructure investments by realizing gains such as more database transactions per second, lower access latency and easier application scaling.

The new HGST PCIe SSDs are a key building block for delivering HGST server-side Flash solutions. In these solutions, the Ultrastar SN100 Series SSDs are combined with HGST server software - specifically, the HGST Flash Software Suite and HGST Device Manager. This powerful combination creates a server-side Flash platform solution with superior TCO that delivers clustering, scalability, high availability and manageability for performance applications. For MySQL, HGST's server-side Flash solutions have delivered up to 40 percent server consolidation with up to 60 percent performance improvement while maintaining existing MySQL architectures.

With more than one million helium-filled hard disk drives (HDDs) deployed, HGST, a Western Digital company today announced it has achieved a new milestone in reliability as the only manufacturer with drives field-proven and rated for two and a half (2.5) million hours mean time between failure (MTBF). Today's news demonstrates that HGST's helium HDDs are poised to become the mainstream choice for data center applications where storage density, reliability and power efficiency are paramount. Now shipping its second generation HelioSeal Platform drives, HGST is shifting its volume mix and ramping Helium production to meet strengthening customer demand across cloud and mainstream data center applications.

With strong market acceptance from the largest cloud service providers, Internet giants, OEMs and businesses around the world, including Netflix, Huawei, Inspur, HP, OVH, Starline, Buffalo, DataON, DDN and Racktop to name a few, the HGST HelioSeal Platform represents proven innovation in high-capacity HDD technology and reliability, while lowering true total cost of ownership (TCO). While there are a number of ways to increase hard drive capacity, HGST's HelioSeal platform is the only technology to provide unmatched reliability and a long-term path for delivering higher capacity storage on a standard 3.5-inch HDD form factor, while lowering power and drive temperature at the same time. All this equates to best storage density, TB-per-system weight, TB/Sq. foot and lowest watt/TB for enterprise and cloud data centers.

Western Digital Corporation announced today that HGST has completed the acquisition of Amplidata, a privately-held developer of object storage software for public and private cloud data centers. HGST is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp. The acquisition supports the company's strategy to expand into higher value data storage platforms and systems that deliver breakthrough value and scalability to address the massive growth in storage requirements in cloud data centers.

Amplidata's Himalaya software is a versatile platform for massively-scalable, secure and flexible storage services and solutions. It allows customers to store and manage exabytes of data and trillions of stored objects, representing an exponential leap in scale that anticipates rapid growth in customers' appetite for highly durable and available storage. Prior to the acquisition, HGST had selected Amplidata as a joint development partner for the HGST Active Archive platform, which aims to enable breakthrough levels of storage efficiency at an ultra-low total cost of ownership.

Western Digital Corporation announced today that HGST has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Amplidata, a privately-held developer of object storage software for public and private cloud data centers. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. HGST is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corp. The acquisition supports the company's strategy to expand into higher value data storage platforms and systems that deliver breakthrough value and scalability to address the massive growth in storage requirements in cloud data centers.

Amplidata's primary offering is Himalaya, an advanced object storage software product that enables scale-out software-defined storage systems. By delivering industry leading scalability with the efficiency, resiliency, and flexibility required for demanding cloud data center environments, Amplidata's products and technology have earned the trust of leading OEMs and cloud service providers.

Russian cyber-security company Kaspersky Labs exposed a breakthrough U.S. spying program, which taps into one of the most widely proliferated PC components - hard drives. With the last 5 years seeing the number of hard drive manufacturing nations reduce from three (Korean Samsung, Japanese Hitachi and Toshiba, and American Seagate and WD) to one (American Seagate or WD), swallowing-up or partnering with Japanese and Korean businesses as US-based subsidiaries or spin-offs such as HGST, a shadow of suspicion has been cast on Seagate and WD.

According to Kaspersky, American cyber-surveillance agency, the NSA, is taking advantage of the centralization of hard-drive manufacturing to the US, by making WD and Seagate embed its spying back-doors straight into the hard-drive firmware, which lets the agency directly access raw data, agnostic of partition method (low-level format), file-system (high-level format), operating system, or even user access-level. Kaspersky says it found PCs in 30 countries with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria.

QNAP Systems, Inc. today announced that its Enterprise and SMB-class Turbo NAS products now support HGST's Ultrastar He8 helium-filled hard disk drives (HDDs). By incorporating HGST's HelioSeal platform technology, enterprise users benefit from enhanced NAS performance, maximized storage capacity, and optimum energy efficiency for reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).

Leveraging the inherent benefits of helium, which is one-seventh the density of air, the HGST Ultrastar He8 advances the TCO value proposition for hyperscale cloud data centers, enterprises, SMBs, and system integrators. Combining industry-leading storage capacity with industry-leading low power consumption, the HGST Ultrastar He8 is an ideal large-capacity 3.5-inch HDD solution for businesses to store, secure and harness the power of data.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today reported revenue of $3.9 billion and net income of $460 million, or $1.93 per share, for its second fiscal quarter ended Jan. 2, 2015. On a non-GAAP basis, net income was $539 million or $2.26 per share. In the year-ago quarter, the company reported revenue of $4.0 billion and net income of $430 million, or $1.77 per share. Non-GAAP net income in the year-ago quarter was $532 million, or $2.19 per share.

The company generated $243 million in cash from operations during the December quarter, net of the Seagate arbitration award payment of $773 million, ending with total cash and cash equivalents of $4.9 billion. During the December quarter, the company utilized $309 million to repurchase 3.2 million shares of common stock. On Nov. 4, the company declared a $0.40 per common-share dividend, which was paid on Jan. 15.

The fastest, most versatile I/O in any desktop of any size, Up To 25x Faster than firewire800, Thunderbolt 2 technology in ST4-TB is phenomenally fast. The two Thunderbolt 2 ports on ST4-TB features dual 20-Gbps channels for data transfer and that's up to four times faster than USB 3. But beyond speed, Thunderbolt gives you unprecedented expansion capabilities. You can daisy-chain as many as six Thunderbolt devices to a single port. And since Thunderbolt is based on Display Port technology, Mini Display Port devices like Apple LED Cinema Display can plugs right in, too.

For field editing applications, the ST4-TB can be made portable as it comes with a grip handle, which you can choose to install for making creative contents mobile convenient and less bulky. With two optional storage modes, user can choose between RAID 0 and independent mode. In RAID 0 mode, the enclosed four drives will be striped and combined into one large volume for storage to enhance the data transfer speed performance. Under the Independent mode, the enclosed drives are seen as four separate volumes instead of one single volume.

Leveraging its data center storage insights, HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), is broadening its scope of innovation to capture new and growing opportunities in data center storage infrastructure. The company today announced six new offerings that will help organizations manage the increasing volume, velocity, variety and longevity of data in today's rapidly evolving data center.

In addition to maintaining its longstanding leadership in storage devices, the new offerings demonstrate HGST's commitment to transform the data center and itself through hardware and software solutions that elevate the value it provides to partners and customers. By creating innovative solutions that shape the emerging categories of Flash fabric solutions and active archive solutions, HGST is driving the data center evolution by helping organizations readily extract the information, knowledge and wisdom that lies within their data.