Backblaze Reveals Q3 2017 Hard Drive Failure Stats

Data storage provider Backblaze unveiled its latest HDD failure stats for 2017’s third quarter. Notably, the company now includes 10TB and 12TB drives for the first time. Although hard drive sales are in decline, new HDDs are becoming more reliable every day. This is borne out by Backblaze’s Q3 review, which reports zero failures for its new 1,240 10TB and 12TB drives. The drives are new, though, so require more long-term stressing to provide an accurate picture of their reliability. Saying that, close to 80% of Backblaze’s HDDs are less than three years old.

Q3 2017 Hard Drive Failure Stats

Backblaze’s Q3 2017 Observations

1. The hard drive failure rate for the quarter was 1.84%, our lowest quarterly rate ever. There are several factors that contribute to this, but one that stands out is the average age of the hard drives in use. Only the 4 TB HGST drives (model: HDS5C4040ALE630) have an average age over 4 years — 51.3 months to be precise. The average age of all the other drive models is less than 4 years, with nearly 80% of all of the drives being less than 3 years old.
2. The 10- and 12 TB drive models are new. With a combined 13,000 drive days in operation, they’ve had zero failures. While all of these drives passed through formatting and load testing without incident, it is a little too early to reach any conclusions.