“I find your lack of faith disturbing.” 5 You might have noticed the AFR for Q1 2022 of 24.31% for the 8TB HGST drives (model: HUH728080ALE604).A good start, but surely not Jedi territory yet. Between the two models, there are 3,899 operational drives and only one failure since they were installed six months ago. The two 16TB WDC drives (models: WUH721816ALEL0 and WUH721816ALEL4) lead the youth movement with an average age of 5.9 and 1.5 months respectively. “Great, kid, don’t get cocky.” 4 There were a number of padawan drives (in average age) that also had zero drive failures in Q1 2022.Still, they’ve averaged just one drive failure per year over their Backblaze lifetime. The 4TB Toshiba (model: MD04ABA400V) also had zero failures during Q1 2022 and the average age (82.3 months) is nearly as old as the Seagate drives, but the Toshiba cohort has only 97 drives. The youngest 6TB drive in the entire cohort is a little over four years old. 98% of the drives (859) were installed within the same two-week period back in Q1 2015. “The Force is strong with this one.” 3 The 6TB Seagate (model: ST6000DX000) continues to defy time with zero failures during Q1 2022 despite an average age of nearly seven years (83.7 months).In reviewing the Q1 2022 table above and the data that lies underneath, we offer a few observations and caveats: “Always pass on what you have learned.” 2 The chart below contains the results of our analysis for Q1 2022. This leaves us with 207,478 hard drives to analyze for this report. For our evaluation, we removed 394 drives from consideration as they were either used for testing purposes or were drive models which did not have at least 60 active drives.

“The greatest teacher, failure is.” 1Īs of the end of Q1 2022, Backblaze was monitoring 207,872 hard drives used to store data. Along the way, we will share our observations and insights on the data presented and, as always, we look forward to you doing the same in the comments section at the end of the report. In between, we will dive into the failure rates of the active drive models over time. We will review the hard drive failure rates for those drive models that were active as of the end of Q1 2022, and we’ll also look at their lifetime failure statistics. This report will focus on those data drives. Of that number, there were 3,860 boot drives, leaving us with 207,872 data drives under management. As of the end of Q1 2022, Backblaze was monitoring 211,732 hard drives and SSDs in our data centers around the universe. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Backblaze began collecting and storing statistics about the hard drives it uses to store customer data.

Backblaze drive report