Backblaze has just released their hard drive failure rates for 2016, and many people base their purchase of a hard drive on these stats. A total of 1,225 drives failed in 2016, which means the drive failure rate for 2016 was just 1.95 percent, a improving over the 2.47 percent that died in 2015 and miles below the 6.39 percent that hit the garbage bin in 2014. From the data it seems that Hitachi hard drives have the lowest failure rate, and overall the lowest failures occur in 3TB drives, with 5TB ones being the least reliable.
Backblaze has recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in our data centers since April 2013. At the end of 2016 we had 73,653 spinning hard drives. Of that number, there were 1,553 boot drives and 72,100 data drives. This post looks at the hard drive statistics of the data drives we monitor. We’ll first look at the stats for Q4 2016, then present the data for all of 2016, and finish with the lifetime statistics for all of the drives Backblaze has used in our cloud storage data centers since we started keeping track. Along the way we’ll share observations and insights on the data presented. As always you can download our Hard Drive Test Data to examine and use.
Hard Drive Reliability Statistics for Q4 2016
At the end of Q4 2016 Backblaze was monitoring 72,100 data drives. For our evaluation we remove from consideration those drives which were used for testing purposes and those drive models for which we did not have at least 45 drives. This leaves us with 71,939 production hard drives. The table below is for the period of Q4 2016.
Check out their report here.
