Backblaze Publishes Q1 2023 Hard Drive Failure Rate Report, 2-3 Year Average Life Expectancy

Backblaze has supplied the newest update to their Hard Drive Failure Rates statistics which covers the first quarter of 2023 & includes both client storage drives and backup drives. This new report covers 237,278 data drives in use.

In the first quarter of this year, the company tracked 237,278 drives that are used to hold client data. From those drives, 385 were removed as they were the only drives used for testing or low-in-quantity drives. The final count of drives monitored for this analysis is 236,893. Those drives are grouped into thirty models that were analyzed.

The AFR, or annualized failure rate, for the first quarter this year was 1.54%, which increased by .33% from the previous quarter. Andy Klein, Backblaze's author of the report, notes that the AFR quarterly numbers "can be volatile" but can also be helpful to see if a trend appears in the future.

For instance, HGST (model HUH721212ALN604), Seagate (ST12000NM0007), and Western Digital (WDC, model WUH721414ALE6L4) all had a substantial AFR increase, with the first company seeing 246%, the second 138%, and WDC seeing 242% AFR quarterly increases. All three drives are 12 TB in size or above.

Two drives saw zero failures: the 16 TB Seagate ST16000NM002J & the 8 TB ST8000NM000A. Those drives were less than 50,000 drive days old, so no data exists to form a full analysis. However, the Toshiba 8 TB HDWF180 replaced 187 8TB drives from the previous quarter, so those are now making a list for future analysis.

The company is phasing out smaller capacity drives, such as their 6 and 10-TB drives, which only have a single model for each. The drive days for the 6 TB drives are 79,651, while the 10 TB drives are at 105,443. The remaining drives have 2.2 million drive days or more, allowing for more reliability in the report.

Backblaze has previously mentioned that older drives tend to fail more than newer drives, and most older drive models that are in use come from Seagate. Of those drives, sixty percent make up the 4 TB drives which are 89 months old, and 95% of the company's 8 TB drives are also from Seagate and pushing 70 months old or more. Of the 6 TB Seagate drives, the current AFR is 0.92%, with a lifetime AFR of 0.89%.

Klein mentions that Blocks & Files published a post that analyzed the average age of a hard drive upon failure and found that the average age was two years and ten months. Klein and Backblaze used the same data to see if the average age of drive failure matched the website's findings.

What was found was that after recording the drive's date, serial number, model, drive_capacity, failure, and SMART 9 raw value and removing 1,355 failed boot drives along with 95 drives that did not record any attributes, they were left with 17,250 data drives, with an average age equalling two years and seven months, which flows with Block & Files data.

When we first saw the Secure Data Recovery average failed age, we thought two years and 10 months was too low. We were surprised by what our data told us, but a little math never hurt anyone. Given we are always adding additional failed drives to our dataset and retiring drive models along the way, we will continue to track the average failed age of our drive models and report back if we find anything interesting.

— Andy Klein, Backblaze

When asked about temperature issues found in the recent SSD life expectancy report that Klein published for Backblaze, he stated, "We have not seen any real changes yet, but it has only been a couple of months. We will continue to monitor the environment and will relook at the topic in the mid-year report in September."

We also asked if the current economic changes affected the company acquiring components. Klein reported, "We have a decrease in memory prices, but that’s a minor cost for us. Availability for some  components (PDUs, cabinets, etc.) is getting better, lead times for servers and networking gear are still longer than we would like."

News Source: Backblaze