Yes, it's true: Hard drive failures creep up as disks age

Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze has published its latest quarterly report detailing the reliability of disk storage deployed in its datacenters. Backblaze had a total of 219,444 hard drives and SSDs in its bit barns at the end of calendar Q2, of which 4,020 are boot drives, so the company has focused on the 215,424 …

[Pascal Monett]

"their failure rate over the past four quarters [has] now reached 3.42 percent"

Okay, I will acknowledge that 3.42% of over 200k drives hits the 7000 replacement mark, which is non-negligeable.

Except that it is just one model, not the entire park. Why replace the entire range of the model for just a 3.4% failure rate ?

That seems a bit wasteful to me.

That said, Backblaze is a treasure trove of drive reliability reports and can't stop saying thank you to them.

I now know that the 6TB Seagate drive is the thing to buy at the moment. I'll be thinking about it.

[Ayemooth]

Re: "their failure rate over the past four quarters [has] now reached 3.42 percent"

Actually the 6TB Seagate was the one to buy 86.7 months ago. Who knows what the reliability of the currently-available equivalent is.

[doublelayer]

Re: "their failure rate over the past four quarters [has] now reached 3.42 percent"

It doesn't look like they're trashing the lot just yet, but they are getting extra copies of the data on them in the expectation that they'll have several failures in the near future. They may be kept around for existing data, but I doubt they'll put new data on them and will be cycling them out as they start to fail.

[Horst U Rodeinon]

I'm shocked

To learn that the failure rate for (electro-)mechanical devices increases with age. What's the next mind bogglingly mind boggling news we will be treated to? I can hardly wait!

[b0llchit]

Re: I'm shocked

What's the next mind bogglingly mind boggling news...

Good News! You are getting older and will eventually die.

[Arthur the cat]

Re: I'm shocked

You are getting older and will eventually die.

A mathematics lecturer says: It should be noted that getting older and dying are not commutative.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: I'm shocked

It's a suspect conclusion anyway. None of the billions of people alive at the moment have died, so there doesn't seem to be any correlation between being alive now and dying.

[Number6]

I start getting nervous when I spot a drive over 5 years old (near-24/7 run-time so 43,000 hours or so. However, I've had one that didn't get replaced until something over 80,000 hours (9 years) and it was still functioning. I just replaced a couple that were around 75,000 hours and not showing signs of failure. I suspect my nervousness comes from earlier generations of drives and that newer models do last longer, plus have better monitoring to warn of impending failure.

[tapanit]

Yep. I have two Hitachi Deskstars that've been running for over 93300 hours now (almost 11 years). I've been ready to replace them for a long time but so far they're showing no signs of failure and they're not in all that critical use now so I'm not going to rush it.

[Anonymous Coward]

SSDs

I hope to see the SSD report here when it's published later.

I've been using Backblaze statistics for years. Have a pint.

[Stuart Halliday]

What to dae...

Are these drives actually dumped or are they sold off somewhere?

[DerekCurrie]

Oh! That's How Backblaze Lost My Data!

I'm so glad they figured it out after all these years.

But sadly, that doesn't improve my confidence in their cloud services.