Backblaze has been releasing an annual report of their hard drive reliability for five years now. It’s a rare look into real world performance of drives at pretty massive scale. For 2018, they had just under 105,000 data drives in operation for their cloud storage and backup services.
This year saw the company migrating to much larger drive, the company averaged 75 drive migrations a day. The last of their 4TB drives have gone the way of the Dodo, with 12TB drives being brought on from Seagate and HGST, and even larger 14TB helium-filled PMR drives from Toshiba.
For the year, those 14TB Toshiba units saw the highest percentages of failures, but largely in line with what they expect from new models. For lifetime stats, one interesting bit stands out. Backblaze had 45 5TB Toshiba surveillance drives in their keep, which hasn’t seen a failure since Q2 2016. A small sample size for sure, but that’s a nice little run.
Andy Klein comments:
This review looks at the hard drive failure rates by make and model for 100,000+ disk drives in operation in our data centers.
Read more at: Backblaze Hard Drive Stats
