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New data from Data backup in the cloud and memory management The Backblaze company seems to confirm that the age of a hard disk (HDD) increases the probability of failure.
A report published in a post Office (opens in new tab) on the Backblaze Blog (via The registry (opens in new tab)) notes that a drive’s age is an important factor in predicting failure, correlating with, according to Backblazes, “Cloud storage Evangelist” Andy Klein, Backblaze’s legacy drive portfolio.
According to statistics from 230,921 of its drives used as storage purposes, smaller drives (from 4 to 10 TB) failed more often than larger ones (12 to 16 TB), but they were also older.
HDD failure trends
Backblaze data shows on the surface that the smallest drives from Seagate and Toshiba in their portfolio are the most prone to failure, with both vendors’ products accounting for 3.64% of all the company’s drive failures in Q3 2022.
Klein, however, praised the “very respectable” annualized failure rates (AFRs) of its longest-running drives from these vendors (some of them after nearly eight years of use) and continued to single out Seagate drives as suitable for enterprise use.
“In general, Seagate hard drives are cheaper and […] Their failure rates are typically not high enough to make them less cost effective over their lifetime.”
Klein believes that in 2023, Backblaze will replace its smaller drives with larger ones. To date, there has been no inherent correlation between a drive’s size and its susceptibility to failure, and in fact only the 16TB drives saw a net 0.07% decrease in AFR.
As a result, we may have to wait for Backblaze to increasingly migrate to larger drives as part of its fleet before evidence of this type of correlation emerges.
According to Backblaze, it is Disk failure data (opens in new tab) supports the bathtub curve (opens in new tab)This means that a product has higher failure rates at the beginning of its life cycle, which level out and increase again over the course of its life cycle.
However, it has seen improvements in HDD manufacturing across the board. In a 2021 Curve report, the company claims many manufacturers, such as Seagate, have moved extensive testing of their HDDs before shipment (opens in new tab)thereby reducing the likelihood of early failures.
It has also been observed that many drives tend to last longer and fail much more frequently in the fifth or sixth year than in the third or fourth year, as was the case in Backblaze’s previous report on the curve in 2013.
