The drive with the highest AFR (2.57%) is a Seagate 4TB model. Among drives with more than 2.2 million days of use, the drive with the lowest AFR (.28%) is a Western Digital Corporation 16TB model. The average AFR over the last decade was was 1.4%. “Quarterly AFR numbers can be volatile, but can be useful in identifying a trend which needs further investigation,” Klein wrote. According to the report’s author, Andrew Klein, the AFR for the first quarter of 2023 was 1.54%, up over the first quarter of 2022 at 1.22%. It looks at Annual Failure Rate (AFR) by size, model, and manufacturer, and further breaks down the information by average age of hard drive at failure. The company began the study a decade ago. With nearly 250,000 hard drives housed globally across its data centers, Backblaze analyzes and publishes quarterly findings to highlight key trends and data points.

Hardware durability is a critical component of the cloud storage industry. The latest edition looks at the first three months of 2023 and shares the average age of failed hard drives by drive size, model, and more to help IT decision-makers shopping for new storage drives for their businesses. The Drive Stats report analyzes quarterly and lifetime hard drive reliability and failure rates. On average, hard drives fail after two and a half years, according to new results of an ongoing study published by specialized storage cloud platform provider Backblaze. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. To learn more about how we can help you mitigate your risk click on the button below.Enterprise Storage Forum content and product recommendations are editorially independent. It is imperative these failed drives are properly audited, securely contained, and destroyed onsite to help maintain compliance and offer piece of mind. Having failed drives lying around is a recipe for disaster, or rather, a recipe for a data breach. With more light shed on just how high drive failure rates are, it is important that the above questions are considered. What happens to those drives when they fail? Do they sit on a desk? In a box or plastic tub? Are the individual drives accounted for as they are removed from their working environment? This also means currently there are hundreds of thousands of drives active in an environment that could have a failure rate as high as 25%. More importantly it means more data at rest, which greatly increases the chance of a data breach from data walking off. A failed drive can create server downtime and more work, which means less time for other tasks. What does this mean to everyone? What it means to data centers and data center managers is they need to be more careful what brand they buy, for a few obvious reasons. This is not always, and usually isn’t always the case. Now keep in mind, these drives are running in near optimal conditions, as this is a data storage company. They had a range of 3.8% to a whopping 25.4%. The surprising figures come from Seagate, of the 3 major brands tested Seagate was the worst. Western digital drives failed at a slightly higher rate of around 2.5% to 3.5%. These numbers are closer to what manufacturers will tell you, but they are among the few in this category.

Hitachi came out on top with less than 2% overall failure rate, their actual numbers were 0.9% to 1.1%. To the left you can see how each of the three brands did. Backblaze measured the reliability of the drives based on their annual failure rate, which is the average number of failures while running a drive for one year. The most attention was given to the top 3 in the industry, Hitachi, Western Digital, and Seagate. Many drives performed as expected, some did better than expected, and others failed miserably.

The study consisted of over 25,000 drives (27,134 to be exact) from the industries top manufacturers Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, and Samsung.īackblaze took all of the drives and put them into their environment and kept a close eye on them to see how they would perform. Online backup specialists Backblaze completed a study on the reliability of hard drive brands currently on the market, and the results were very interesting.

Backblaze hard drive failure rates