US cloud service provider Backblaze has published its annual report on the reliability of hard drives in the company's infrastructure. According to a report by Tom's Hardware, by 2025, the total number of hard drives will reach 344,196 hard drives, and the total operating time will exceed 115 million days, which ensures high statistical reliability of the data.
According to the report, the average annual failure rate (AFR) dropped to 1.36%, the best result in the past three years. For comparison: in 2023 this figure is 1.70%, in 2024 – 1.57%.
Minimal number of errors demonstrated with individual Seagate and Western Digital models. In particular, the Seagate ST16000NM002J 16 TB drive and the Western Digital WUH722626ALE6L4 26 TB drive only recorded one failure during the year.
At the same time, the highest error rate was observed in the old 8-terabyte HGST models, where AFR reached 10.29%. The company attributed this to vibration loads and natural wear: the drives were more than 7.5 years old and were being prepared for retirement.
The 16-terabyte Toshiba models also encountered difficulties, including one quarter where the error rate increased to 16.95%. After updating the firmware, this number decreased to 4.14%.
