Feb 12, 2025 20:00:00

Backblaze, a storage service that operates approximately 300,000 HDDs, has released 'Statistical Data by Manufacturer and Model 2024 Edition,' which summarizes the failure rates by model.

Backblaze, a cloud storage service provider, operates more than 300,000 drives in its own data centers and regularly publishes failure rates of storage devices by manufacturer and model. In a report published on February 11, 2025, the company reported annual statistics such as the annual failure rate (AFR) for 298,054 drives.

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2024/

Backblaze operated 27 HDD models in 2024, with Toshiba's

MG08ACA16TA being the most popular with 40,185 units. The average AFR for all models in 2024 was 1.57%, with a total of 4,372 failures. There were no models with zero failures, but Seagate's ST16000NM000J had only one failure in 2024, with an AFR of 0.22%. On the other hand, Seagate's 12TB HDD ST12000NM0007 had an AFR of 11.38% after 409,533 days of operation, making it the most susceptible to failure among all models.

According to Backblaze, the number of drives installed in 2024 will be 53,337, and assuming an annual work week of 2,080 hours (52 weeks x 40 hours), this means that 26 drives will be installed per hour.

Backblaze also announced that it had introduced 1,200 new Seagate 24TB drives,

the ST24000NM002H , during 2024. However, because these drives were introduced in early December 2024, they did not have enough operating time to be counted in this statistic.

Comparing the data for the three years from 2022 to 2024, it looks like this. While the total number of drives in operation increased in 2024 compared to the previous two years, the average AFR remained low at 1.57%. On the other hand, Backblaze points out that the average age of many of the drives in operation exceeds 5 years, so 'the failure rate may gradually increase.'

Backblaze also publishes a graph of failure rates by capacity and year. Looking at the capacity, the failure rate of the 10TB model is higher than that of other models.

Below is a graph of failure rates by manufacturer and year. The failure rate of HGST drives, which was a subsidiary of Western Digital, has been rising sharply since 2024.

Backblaze also publishes the lifetime failure rate of its drives. The target is drives of models with more than 500 units in operation as of the end of 2024 and with a cumulative operation period of more than 100,000 days. After excluding those that did not meet the criteria, 298,230 drives of 25 models remained for analysis, with an average AFR of 1.31%.