#BACKBLAZE HARD DRIVE FAILURE RATES ARCHIVE#
#BACKBLAZE HARD DRIVE FAILURE RATES PC#
#BACKBLAZE HARD DRIVE FAILURE RATES PROFESSIONAL#

Of the total 206,928 drives Backblaze manages, 3,760 were boot drives that were not included in their drive stats report.ĭata Drive – A drive solely used for storing data. Starting With Contextīefore we get into the weeds, let’s break down some jargon and add a bit of context so that you have a better frame of reference going forward.īoot Drive – A drive that the computer boots the operating system from. But Backblaze – a cloud storage and data backup company that formed in 2007 – has been doing this for years with consumer drives and sharing their findings publicly for free. Of course, that’s not feasible for most consumers. If you think about it, one of the best ways to test hard drives for reliability is to run a huge number of them for years and take note on how they all fare. But how do you know when you’ve found a reliable drive? So, when you’re looking for a hard drive to store your family photos, videos, and other data, you want something that’s going to last. With our lives becoming increasingly digitized, the need for reliable data storage is at an all-time high. Today, multiple backups and good luck are what’s needed for the most reliable data storage.Today, data is considered one of the most precious resources in the world. There’s no recession in the digital data storage business. Though specific estimates vary, there’s a consensus that the rate of growth is about 50% each year.

#BACKBLAZE HARD DRIVE FAILURE RATES ARCHIVE#

What’s state-of-the-art in storage today may not be a year from now.Īt the same time, everyone’s need to archive a vast amount of data is exploding. The creation of a very long-term, highly reliable archival storage medium is the subject of a vast amount of research these days it’s an ever changing technology.

#BACKBLAZE HARD DRIVE FAILURE RATES PC#

For most normal PC and Mac personal computer users, the cost dictates the second option.Īnother factor is there is no such thing today as permanent storage technology for the masses.

#BACKBLAZE HARD DRIVE FAILURE RATES PROFESSIONAL#

So what’s a computer user to do? Essentially there are two choices today for serious archiving: either spend big money to record your data on a professional magneto-optical or other archival media for long term backup or use a combination of hard drives, SSD and cloud backup. So somewhere between 6-10 years, your data is going to disappear because the magnetic field is no longer strong enough to retain the data. No magnetic drive company claims its products can store data reliably for more than 10 years. The rule of thumb is all magnetic media, like that used in hard drives, has a half-life of about five years. Though the Backblaze data can help us small-scale users determine which models to buy, there is still no guarantee the drive won’t fail. Backblaze has 250 Dell DellBoss VD SSD drives. Its AFR was even more impressive at 0.36%. The company also has 562 Seagate ZA250CM10002 drives. There are only four of them in use and one of them failed.īackblaze uses 1,090 of the Seagate ZA250CM10003 drives and it had a 1.04% AFR in 2021.

The situation is more extreme with the Seagate drive in question. While there’s a high AFR, there’s a low sample size and a wide confidence interval. Backblaze uses only 20 Crucial drives, and they were all installed in December. The overall number of these SSD drives, however, is much lower than hard drives. AFR = (drive failures /(drive days / 365)) * 100. Backblaze measures the failure rate of its 203,928 hard drives by annualized failure rate, or AFR. One of the best is Backblaze, a cloud storage and data backup company, which I use in addition to Apple’s iCloud on my Mac. The only way to protect your detail is through redundant backups to different drives.įortunately, there are people measuring the failure rate of both hard and SSD drives. But then you have to ask, how reliable is that new drive you just bought? Which brands are most reliable? Can I depend on a drive not failing? Sadly, the answer is a resounding NO. Smart users (or should I say paranoid?) turn drives over every few years. The fact is, sooner or later, all storage media fails. Yet, I’m still afraid of losing data through some oddball thing I haven’t thought about. Every year, I put one of my main SSD drives in a safe deposit box, in case everything else fails. I do backups to several hard drives, SSDs and two cloud services.

Backblaze hard drive failure rates