The Bigger HDDs Come, The Harder They Fall. Well, Kind Of
Blocks&Files, Wednesday, May 3,2023
Cloud and backup storage supplier Backblaze publishes quarterly hard disk drive failure rate statistics and has just started doing so for its SSD boot drives as well. Not much has changed in the annualized failure rates (AFR) with the latest HDD failure stats. As lifetime drive hours increase, the HDD population grows: there are 236,893 now, and an average AFR of 1.54 percent.
The latest Backblaze HDD AFR report has the usual table of HDD failure numbers by drive model and failure rate charts by capacity. As drives gain more capacity over time, we could say this chart shows a recovery in drive reliability after a 10TB failure rate peak. The newest 16TB drives are now the most reliable in Backblaze's HDD buying history.