Chris Clor

(Credit score: Chris Clor/Getty Photographs)Backblaze makes cash by storing knowledge — a whole lot of knowledge. Whereas SSDs have displaced hard drives in lots of functions, there’s no higher method to retailer giant volumes of knowledge than old style spinning drive. In 2022, the corporate managed 235,608 exhausting drives, giving it perception into long-term reliability. Backblaze has posted one other installment of its exhausting drive stat evaluation, displaying which producers, fashions, and capacities are essentially the most dependable.

The brand new report consists of exhausting drives from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital, with sizes starting from 4TB all the way in which as much as 16TB. In all, the information consists of 29 totally different fashions. Backblaze opted to drop drive modes numbering fewer than 60 from the information, in addition to these used for testing. That leaves 230,921 exhausting drives to investigate.

Typically, the annualized failure charge (AFR) knowledge follows the “bathtub curve.” Some exhausting drives will fail nearly instantly after being put into service. After these faulty items are changed, a fleet of spinning drives will expertise very low failure charges till they’ve been used for a few years. That’s when the failure charge once more will increase, revealing which drives are essentially the most dependable.

In 2021, Backblaze reported an overall failure rate of 1.01%, and the 2022 report reveals the next 1.37% charge. The corporate believes that is unsurprising given the ageing of its storage gadgets. “We may dig in additional, however that’s most likely moot at this level,” Backblaze says in the blog post. The chart beneath has drives grouped by dimension with the typical age, displaying that failure charges start creeping up after just a few years of service. Effectively, more often than not.

Curiously, the oldest drive in Backblaze’s fleet is the ST6000DX000, a 6TB Seagate drive with a median service lifetime of 92.5 months. In 2022, the AFR for this mannequin was simply 0.68%, making it a particularly dependable and cost-efficient drive. Nonetheless, that’s an outlier — Seagate drives have a tendency towards increased failure charges, with some 12-14TB fashions hitting an AFR of 4-5%. Then again, Seagate drives are additionally cheaper, and Backblaze nonetheless sees the worth in utilizing Seagate drives for its large-scale operation. Though, possibly not a lot for those who want one or two extremely dependable drives.

For a cloud storage operation, not one of the drives within the knowledge present severe points — even these with the best AFR are nonetheless viable at Backblaze’s scale. If you wish to zero in on essentially the most dependable model, Western Digital has the most effective numbers proper now. HGST, a now-discontinued Western Digitial sub-brand, additionally reveals strong reliability. Toshiba is the subsequent highest, adopted by Seagate. It’s value mentioning that even the worst AFRs are just a few % after years of service. We’ve come a great distance.

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