Cloud storage and storage analytics specialist Backblaze has just released a juicy report covering the reliability of the hundreds of thousands of hard drives deployed on the company's servers — Backblaze managed 236,893 HDDs as of 1Q23. The report covers the reliability and failures experienced on the various models.
Taking into account Power-On-Hours for any failed HDD while excluding failed boot drives, drives that had no SMART raw attribute data, or drives with out-of-bounds data, Backblaze has seen 17,155 dead HDDs since its operational beginning. Averaged-out, the failed hard drives had an average operational runtime of only two years and six months. If you're in Europe, that's less durability than the minimum warranty required by law, which stands at three years.
Backblaze grouped the dead HDDs in 30 models, excluding those with less than 50 failures so as not to skew the results with outliers. Here are the models (ranging from 4TB through 12TB) in a neat table:
