Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for Q1 2017

[Matsuda]

 

In this update, we’ll review the Q1 2017 and lifetime hard drive failure rates for all our current drive models, and we’ll look at a relatively new class of drives for us – “enterprise”. We’ll share our observations and insights, and as always, you can download the hard drive statistics data we use to create these reports.
 

Backblaze has now recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in our data centers for over 4 years. This data includes the SMART attributes reported by each drive, along with related information such a the drive serial number and failure status. As of March 31, 2017 we had 84,469 operational hard drives. Of that there were 1,800 boot drives and 82,669 data drives. For our review, we remove drive models of which we have less than 45 drives, leaving us to analyze 82,516 hard drives for this report. There are currently 17 different hard drives models, ranging in size from 3 to 8 TB in size. All of these models are 3½” drives.
 

Hard Drive Reliability Statistics for Q1 2017

Since our last report in Q4 2016, we have added 10,577 additional hard drives to bring us to the 82,516 drives we’ll focus on. We’ll start by looking at the statistics for the period of January 1, 2017 through March 31, 2017 – Q1 2017. This is for the drives that were operational during that period, ranging in size from 3 to 8 TB as listed below.
 

Lifetime Hard Drive Failure Rates for Current Drives
 

The table below shows the failure rates for the hard drive models we had in service as of March 31, 2017. This is over the period beginning in April 2013 and ending March 31, 2017. If you are interested in the hard drive failure rates for all the hard drives we’ve used over the years, please refer to our 2016 hard drive review.

Source - Backblaze