Report: HDDs are becoming less reliable: is this the price to pay for cheaper, higher capacity storage?
According to the latest findings from cloud storage company Backblaze, which analyzed the annual failure rates of more than 270,000 hard drives by 2023, HDDs are becoming less reliable overall.
The comprehensive report, which covers 35 different hard drive models running for a total of nearly 90 million days by 2023, shows that the annualized failure rate has risen to 1.70%.
This is a notable increase from the 1.37% rate in 2022 and the 1.01% rate in 2021, which marks HDDs as less reliable counterparts to SSDs.
Hard drives are failing more and more often
The report, which is one of the largest representations of storage device performance worldwide, revealed widespread failures, with only one of 35 models achieving a 0% failure rate. At the other end of the scale, some of the drives reviewed by the company reported an alarmingly high failure rate of around 10-15%.
While the numbers portend an uncertain future for the hard drive, they are a testament to Backblaze’s commitment to providing a reliable cloud service – the company claims to have replaced a hard drive on average every two hours and five minutes by 2023.
The development of hard drives has reduced costs while increasing storage capacity. So while they are starting to show their flaws, hard drives still have their place. For example, Backblaze’s largest HDDs – 22TB WDC models – offer enormous storage options.
While failure rates indicate a worrisome future for HDD vendors worldwide, Backblaze notes a limitation of the study: By 2023, approximately one-fifth of the company’s fleet consisted of legacy drives (six years or older).
However, some interesting insights can be gleaned from the research; For example, 10TB hard drives fail at least twice as often as any other capacity in the company’s fleet.
Backblaze has yet to announce its 2023 statistics for SSD models, but in 2022 the annualized failure rate was 0.98%, quite similar to the 1.05% rate recorded in 2021. However, fewer SSDs are being tracked and they tend to be somewhat newer, making a comparison between SSD and HDD models unreliable for now.