News Backup Company Reveals Hard Drive Failure Rates For 2022

[Admin]

Backblaze has published the company's annual report on hard drive failure rates for last year.

Backup Company Reveals Hard Drive Failure Rates For 2022 : Read more

 

[PEnns]

"The devil is in the details, though. Backblaze stated that it only had 79 drives on active duty, so the sample size is tiny compared to some of the other models that total up to tens of thousands. "

Those "reports and survey" are so pathetically flawed and worthless, it's a waste of bandwidth and time to even read their titles!!

 

[nitts999]

Disagree. The alternative is what? Amazon reviews? With 79 drives in this case and many more in others, you would quickly find a drive that was a lemon/highly problematic. So at the very least, it lets you know that on the whole, the drive is good or bad.

 

[USAFRet]

"The devil is in the details, though. Backblaze stated that it only had 79 drives on active duty, so the sample size is tiny compared to some of the other models that total up to tens of thousands. "

Those "reports and survey" are so pathetically flawed and worthless, it's a waste of bandwidth and time to even read their titles!!

What or who do you rely on for drive stats like this?

 

[AtrociKitty]

"The devil is in the details, though. Backblaze stated that it only had 79 drives on active duty, so the sample size is tiny compared to some of the other models that total up to tens of thousands. "

Those "reports and survey" are so pathetically flawed and worthless, it's a waste of bandwidth and time to even read their titles!!

Backblaze releases their drive stats report quarterly, so even the small datasets become valuable as trends emerge. I'd also prefer Backblaze continue to share all their drive data, versus only presenting a curated subset.

 

[PlaneInTheSky]

Backblaze's data confirmed the correlation between drive age and drive failure. When drives get older, they are more likely to die.

More likely? Or is it like dice in craps where you'll eventually throw a 12, but the likelyhood stays the same for each throw.

 

[PEnns]

What or who do you rely on for drive stats like this?

Well, the article clearly states: "... so the sample size is tiny compared to some of the other models that total up to tens of thousand "

Does that mean we throw in the towel and accept this as the bible for hard drive reliability?

 

[USAFRet]

Well, the article clearly states: "... so the sample size is tiny compared to some of the other models that total up to tens of thousand "

Does that mean we throw in the towel and accept this as the bible for hard drive reliability?

No, that was just remarking on the number (79) of that one particular make/model of drive, compared to the hundreds/thousands of others.

Not "79" drives total.

Yes, 79 drives is a small sample size to derive any real stats for fleetwide reliability.
But next quarters numbers may be different.
As were the numbers from last quarter.


Again, you have something better?
I'm all ears.

 

[TJ Hooker]

More likely? Or is it like dice in craps where you'll eventually throw a 12, but the likelyhood stays the same for each throw.

It's an annualized failure rate, so it is indicative of the drives being more likely to fail as they get older.

 

[bit_user]

Disagree. The alternative is what? Amazon reviews?

Whether or not there's a better alternative says nothing about how useful these reports are.

And yes, when comparing products of the same type, you can get a first-order impression by looking at the aggregate Amazon ratings. I tend to condense them from a 5-star scale into a 3-tier scale. If you sum the top 2 ratings and the bottom 2 ratings, you end up with 3 groups of reviewers: those who like/love the product, the mixed/neutral group, and those who dislike/hate it. You can just compare the proportion of like/love or dislike/hate between 2 different products, to get an overall impression of how it's being received.

Then, depending on the product type, you can dive into some of the negative reviews, to see if the common issues tend to be relevant for you. If not, then you can reduce the weight of those negative reviews on your decision-making process.

Anyway, getting back to Backblaze's reports, what would be really nice is if they actually provided histograms of drive life, per model number. They almost definitely have data on when each individual drive went into service, so they can trivially compute its lifespan. Even if they don't track this, the SMART statistics include how many hours the drive was powered on, so you could query those if the drive wasn't totally bricked. This would be a lot more useful than the gross AFR stats they present, since that aggregates together cases of infant mortality with middle-age and old-age deaths.