Backblaze has released the failure rates of HDDs from various vendors powering its data centers for the first quarter of the year. The results don’t really add anything meaningful to the low-capacity segment with all major companies offering multiple solutions with (mostly) low failure rates. Things get interesting in the higher tiers, especially the 14 TB and 16 TB offerings.
None of WD’s 16 TB drives failed during the first quarter, registering a failure rate of 0% through early 2022. Backblaze had a total of 3,800 16 TB drives installed through the quarter, although the bulk of them was operational for just two quarters. Toshiba’s 16 TB offerings fared much worse with an AFR of 1.15% for a cluster of 5,974 drives. Seagate performed well in this segment, although not by much with a failure rate of 0.80% for a total of 13,259 drives with an average age of 7.5 months.
14 TB models from both Seagate and Toshiba showed mixed results with the failure rates varying from 0% to over 4% for two such parts. Backblaze didn’t have any 14 TB Hitachi drives installed while leveraging 8,409 such drives from Western Digital. Remarkably, none of these drives failed since installation roughly 15 months back.
12 TB HDDs are the most popular with over 20K functional drives through 14 months with an AFR of 0.66%. HGST naturally has much better reliability but usage remains scant due to limited stocks on the market.
