Backblaze, a cloud storage and data backup company, has published its annual report on hard drive failures for 2022. The report provides information on the reliability of hard drives, which are still relevant for secondary storage despite the popularity of SSDs.
The company analyzed 230,921 hard drives and found that Seagate's Exos 8TB (ST8000NM000A) had no failures in 2022. However, it's important to note that Backblaze only had 79 of these drives in use. The annualized failure rate for hard drives has increased in recent years, with the rate for 2022 reaching 1.37%. This is due to the aging of the drives, which become more prone to failure over time. The HGST Ultrastar He8 8TB and Seagate Exos X14 14TB had the highest failure rates at 5.27% and 5.70%, respectively, but it's important to consider the smaller sample size for these models.
Seagate's 8TB hard drive, the Exos ST8000NM000A, was the standout performer in the report. It had no failures recorded in 2022, but it's important to note that there were only 79 of these drives in use. Additionally, these drives had only been in use for a little over 22,000 days and were mainly used as backup drives to replace failed drives. The yearly failure rate for hard drives has risen in the past three years, reaching 1.37% in 2022. This increase is due to the age of the drives, as all hardware becomes more likely to fail over time. In 2020, the failure rate was 0.93% and in 2021 it was 1.10%.
