Backblaze, a storage service that operates approximately 285,000 HDDs, releases its second quarter 2024 statistical data by manufacturer and model

Cloud storage service Backblaze has released a report compiling data on 284,386 hard drives in its data centers, excluding those that did not exceed the required operating hours or exceeded the manufacturer's temperature specifications.

Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2024

As of June 30, 2024, Backblaze is operating 29 types of HDDs from four manufacturers: Toshiba, HGST, Seagate, and WDC (Western Digital). By manufacturer, Seagate has the most with 14 types, followed by HGST with 6 types, Toshiba with 5 types, and WDC with 4 types. In addition, by capacity, there are 3 types of 4TB models, 4 types of 8TB models, 1 type of 10TB model, 7 types of 12TB models, 6 types of 14TB models, 7 types of 16TB models, and 1 type of 22TB model.

According to Backblaze, the average failure rate (AFR) for the second quarter of 2024 is 1.71%, up 0.3 percentage points from 1.41% in the first quarter, but down 0.57 percentage points year-on-year. Of the 29 types of HDDs, 16 had an AFR below 1.71%, and 13 had an AFR greater than 1.71%.

Among models with more than 10,000 units in operation, the one with the highest failure rate was the HGST 12TB model (HUH721212ALN604), with a failure rate of 7.17%. The number of units in operation was 10,496, the operating time was 957,573 days, and the number of errors was 188.

Below is a graph showing the operating time on the vertical axis and the AFR on the horizontal axis, and you can see that the failure rate of the HGST 12TB model shown in light blue increases when the average operating time exceeds 48 months. A similar trend can be seen in the Seagate 10TB model shown in green, but on the other hand, some models have a lower failure rate, perhaps because their operation is stable.

During the collection period, no failures occurred in Seagate's 14TB model (ST14000NM000J) and 16TB model (ST16000NM002J). Since the number of units in operation is not large, as both are in the 100-unit unit range, and the total operating time is not long, it is said that it is not impressive, but Seagate's 16TB model has a lifetime failure rate of 0.57%, which is very good.

Basically, the drive is migrated to the next drive before 10 years of operation, so Backblaze does not have a 10-year-old HDD as a data drive, but the HDD boot drive is a WDC 500GB model (WD5000BPKT) that has been in use for over 11 years. Andy Klein, who wrote the report, said, 'Don't tell that to the CVT (Cluster Vault Tome) team.'

◆ Forum is currently open
A forum related to this article has been set up on the official GIGAZINE Discord server . Anyone can post freely, so please feel free to comment! If you do not have a Discord account, please refer to the account creation procedure article to create an account!

• Discord | 'Did your storage break recently?' | GIGAZINE
https://discord.com/channels/1037961069903216680/1271407591498580021