Backblaze Lifetime Hard Drive Failure Stats

[TechLady]

And that's why I don't buy Seagate...ever.

Latest report

 

[Larry Sabo]

Reliability seems more model specific than brand specific. Each brand has their outlier models and the rest all seem to average around 1% failure per year, except for HGST at about half that.

 

[HCHTech]

Is the 'Average Age' column months?

This graph from the current results article seems relevant:

Edit: Two thoughts occur to me here - I have always applauded Backblaze for publishing this data - but as they move away from smaller capacity drives (I can't believe I'm referring to 4TB drives as "smaller" - ha), their failure rate data will mean less and less with regards to consumers and those that service consumers. Secondly, I think I sold less than 5 hard drives in the last year. This data is moving from the "useful" column to the "entertainment" column for me, that's for sure.

 

[DHippo]

Is the 'Average Age' column months?

This graph from the current results article seems relevant:

Edit: Two thoughts occur to me here - I have always applauded Backblaze for publishing this data - but as they move away from smaller capacity drives (I can't believe I'm referring to 4TB drives as "smaller" - ha), their failure rate data will mean less and less with regards to consumers and those that service consumers. Secondly, I think I sold less than 5 hard drives in the last year. This data is moving from the "useful" column to the "entertainment" column for me, that's for sure.

I think you hit the nail right on the head. I service consumers and the highest capacity I've used is 1 Tb upon the customer being adamant that all his business computers needed them. A year later when I serviced the computers most of them weren't even using 10 percent. As they move away from consumer level and small business use drives their data becomes less useful to me.(99 percent of my business)

 

[TechLady]

True...I get that. If you think about it like cars, however: if a given brand has the transmission implode in more than half it's models, are you gonna feel confident about the handful of models that don't? I wouldn't. If there were no other choices then fine. But even though I'm not personally buying large size drives (which have a higher failure rate anyway), I'm probably going to go with a brand that seems less prone to issues in general.

 

[MDD1963]

Somthing seems off with WD's 6 TB numbers...drive count 89, but 72 failures? That's only 3% these days?