Lifetime Statistics on Hard Drives

As of December 31, 2020, the following chart presents the lifetime annualised failure rates of all drive models currently in production.

Both the AFR and the Confidence Intervals

You may understand how helpful the matching AFR value is by looking at the confidence intervals they provide. It is preferable to have a narrower range for the confidence interval rather than a more excellent range, with an extensive range indicating that the related AFR number has little statistical significance. For instance, for the 18-terabyte Seagate SSDs (model number ST18000NM000J), the confidence interval might vary anywhere from 1.5% to 45.8%. The corresponding AFR of 12.54% is not an accurate representation of the failure rate of this drive type since this is an extensive range. Additional data is required. In contrast, when we look at the 14-terabyte Toshiba drive (model number: MG07ACA14TA), the range is from 0.7% to 1.1%, which is a relatively tight range. Furthermore, our confidence in the AFR of 0.9% is considerably more realistic.

There are three thousand boot drives.

As a result of the significant differences between their functions and those of a data drive, boot disks are never included in our reports. Having 3,000 boot drives is a significant achievement, even if it may not be apparent initially. December 31 indicates that we have 3,000 Backblaze Storage Pods that are up and running. Every one of these Storage Pods is arranged in Backblaze Vaults, which include twenty Storage Pods each, for a total of one hundred fifty Backblaze Vaults.

We switched from employing internal hard drives to solid-state drives (SSDs) as boot drives around one year ago. Currently, we have more than 1,200 solid-state disks (SSDs) functioning as boot drives. The SMART and failure data we gather on these ssd internal hard drive boot disks are being validated. We will keep you updated if we come across something worthy of publication.

Are you curious about the shifting patterns shown in the drive statistics for 2020? On-demand access is provided for our webinar titled "Backblaze Hard Drive Report: 2020 Year in Review Q&A," which features Andy Klein, the creator of the drive statistics report.

Data from the Hard Drive Statistics

On our wd external hard drive Test Data page, you can get the whole data set that was used in the process of creating the information that was utilised in this evaluation. Downloading and using this information for your purposes is entirely free of charge. Only three things are required of you: 2) If you use the data, you acknowledge that you are fully responsible for how you use the data, and 3) You do not sell this data to anybody; it is free. If you use the data, you must mention Backblaze as the source.

You can download the ZIP file containing the CSV files for each chart if you are interested in the data that was summarised and utilised to construct the tables and graphs included in this blog post.