We've been following the finest SSDs and HDDs, but Backblaze, a cloud storage provider, offers quarterly and annual statistics on the drive stability of its whole lineup of drive alternatives. The company's most recent report concentrated on its hard disk drive (HDD) stability.
To begin, we were not engaged in the collection of any of this data, and you should treat Backblaze's findings with the same caution you would any business data. In the end, Backblaze is trying to sell products/services.
By the end of 2021, Backblaze was monitoring 203,168 data storage hard drives. They excluded 409 drives that were used for testing reasons or for which lacked at least 60 drives. As a result, and now have 202,759 hard disks to analyze for this report. AFR stands for annualized failure rate. This is different from an annual failure rate in which the number of drives is the same for each model (cohort) throughout the annual period. In the environment, drives are added and leave throughout the year. For example, a new drive installed in Q4 might contribute just 43 days, while a drive that failed in July might contribute 186 days, while drives in continuous operation for the year could contribute 365 days each.
The AFR for 2021 for all drive models was 1.01%, which was slightly higher than the 0.93% we reported for 2020. The next section will compare the data from the last three years. Digging a little deeper, we can aggregate the different drive models by manufacturer to see how failure rates per manufacturer have fared over the last three years.
Lifetime Hard Drive Stats
The chart below shows the lifetime annualized failure rates of all the drive models in production as of December 31, 2021.
The lifetime AFR for all the drives listed above is 1.4% and continues to go down year over year. At the end of 2020, the AFR was 1.54% and at the end of 2019, the AFR stood at 1.62%. When looking at the chart above, several of the drives have a fairly wide confidence interval (>0.5). In these cases, we do not really have enough information about the drive’s performance to be reasonably confident (>95%) in the AFR listed. This is typically the case with lower drive counts or newer drives.
Backblaze announces FY 2021 HDD drive stat Failure Rates Data
