BackBlaze will know their stuff when it comes to hard drive failure rates, offering an online solution to backups and storage. Mounting up to over 60,000 hard drives in operational right now to store encrypted data for subscribers, BackBlaze have issued their quarterly reports on the hard drives they use:
For Q1 2016 we are reporting on 61,590 operational hard drives used to store encrypted customer data in our data center. There are 9.5% more hard drives in this review versus our last review when we evaluated 56,224 drives. In Q1 2016, the hard drives in our data center, past and present, totaled over one billion hours in operation to date. That’s nearly 42 million days or 114,155 years worth of spinning hard drives. Let’s take a look at what these hard drives have been up to.
Backblaze hard drive reliability for Q1 2016
Below are the hard drive failure rates for Q1 2016. These are just for Q1 and are not cumulative, that chart is later.
Some observations on the chart:
- The list totals 61,523 hard drives, not 61,590 noted above. We don’t list drive models in this chart of which we have less than 45 drives.
- Several models have an annual failure rate of 0.00%. They had zero hard drive failures in Q1 2016.
- Failure rates with a small number of failures can be misleading. For example, the 8.65% failure rate of the Toshiba 3TB drives is based on one failure. That’s not enough data to make a decision.
- The overall Annual Failure Rate of 1.84% is the lowest quarterly number we’ve ever seen.
Thats some pretty damning statistics. For the full report you can read at their own website.
