Backblaze Publishes HDD Reliability Stats for Q2 2017

Cloud back and storage provider Backblaze has published their Q2 2017 statistics of hard drive failure rates. There are 83,151 drives in total in the report, 635 more from their Q1 report which saw the addition of 10,000 drives. The Q2 2017 report covers statistics from April 1, through June 30, 2017. It comprises of 17 different 3.5″ HDD models in 3 to 8TB capacities which were operational.

Backblaze Q2 2017 Stats Chart

In addition to the Q2 2017 statistics, Backblaze also released a cumulative  hard drive failure rate chart from April 2013 to June 2017. This includes annualized failure rates and total drive days to put the results more into context. Especially when looking at the quarterly result. It is important to factor in the total drive days of at least 50,000 for a good sample size. Any sample size below that, the failure rates can be skweed based on a small change in the number of drive failures. It is also important when looking at the chart to differentiate between the enterprise models and the consumer desktop models (Seagate ST8000NM005 vs. ST8000DM002 for example).

Fore more information and behind the scenes which factors in to how these numbers came out, visit the Backblaze blog.