Backblaze Publishes Stats for Hard Drive Failure in 2021

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https://www.extremetech.com/computing/331241-backblaze-publishes-stats-for-hard-drive-failure-in-2021

Cloud backup provider Backblaze has collected all the data about which hard drives failed in its pods in 2021, providing a keen insight into what it sees are the most — and least — reliable hard drives.
Backblaze typically does this in a quarterly fashion, but since the year ended it decided to an annual wrap up of sorts for its hard drive army, and it is even sharing data from past years to see how things have changed over time.
The good news: most of them are pretty dang reliable, regardless of capacity or manufacturer. Note that this report does not include information about SSDs, which will be published soon in a separate blog post.

Backblaze says there is one reason for continued low failure rate throughout its drive farm: high capacity hard drives. It defines this as a 12TB, 14TB, or 16TB drive, and all of those drives had a collective failure rate below the 1.01 percent average, while the 4/8/10TB drives all failed at higher rates than average, with the 10TB drives dying the most often at 2.26 percent. Backblaze notes that one of the reasons its high capacity drives are more reliable than average is partly due to the fact that they are the newest drives to be added to the collection.

Comparison chart showing failure rate for both high and lower capacity hard drives. (Image: Backblaze)