At that time, Backblaze's HDD acquisitions were averaging out at a storage cost of around $0.114/GB (for capacities between 1TB and 2TB per HDD). With 253,500 HDDs bought throughout its lifetime, Backblaze certainly has the numbers from which to weave a story.Īndy Klein analyzed Backblaze's HDD purchases throughout the time the company has been operating, starting in 2009. As least, that's the story according to Backblaze's Andy Klein, the company's Principle Storage Cloud Storyteller. While that may sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy, Backblaze goes further than simply noting a well-known HDD pricing trend: the company expects consumers to be able to purchase storage space at a previously unseen $0.01 per GB ratio as soon as 2025. The Barracuda 7200.14 is having problems, but the Barracuda XT is doing well with less than half the failure rate," Backblaze stated.Cloud storage specialist Backblaze expects the downward price trend for HDDs to continue. "We use two different models of Seagate 3TB drives. Hitachi drives, the Seagate 1.5 TB and 4TB drives and Western Digital 1TB drives continued to perform well, Backblaze said, but the Seagate and Western Digital 3.0 TB drives failure rates are up quite a bit.įor example, Seagate's Barracuda 7200.14 3TB hard drives with an average 1.9-year lifespan had a 15.7% annual failure rate. The Western Digital 3TB drives have also failed more, with their rate going up from 4% to 7%," the blog stated. "The surprising (and bad) news is that Seagate 3.0TB drives are failing a lot more, with their failure rate jumping from 9% to 15%. Meanwhile, Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB drives with an average 4.6 year age only had a 3.8% annual failure rate. Western Digital Red 3TB drives, with an average age of half a year, had a failure rate of 8.8%. Those were, however, the oldest drives listed by Backblaze.Ĭonversely, Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 2TB hard drives that were on average 3.4 years old had an annual failure rate of only 1.1%, that data revealed. The latest findings show drives from Hitachi (HGST) were more reliable than Seagate or Western Digital models.įor example, Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB desktop hard drive that was on average 4.3 years old, had an annual failure rate of 24.9%. Most of the drives Backblaze uses are consumer drives with a three-year warranty, "making failures a non-issue from a cost perspective for that period." Last year, the company released the first batch of data showing that nearly one out of four (22%) of more than 25,000 consumer-grade hard drives died in their first four years of use. The Western Digital 3TB drives have also failed more, with their rate rising from 4% to 7%. Seagate 3.0 TB drives break down more, with their failure rate jumping from 9% to 15%. The latest results use data from 38,000 drives compared with its previous study, from January, that used 27,000.
This is the third time Backblaze has released data about annual drive failure rates in its data center. "I analyzed both of these types of drives in our system and found that their failure rates in our environment were very similar - with the consumer drives actually being slightly more reliable." "The assumption that enterprise drives would work better than consumer drives has not been true in our tests," the company stated in a blog post. The service provider noted that on Amazon, a Seagate 3TB enterprise drive is priced at $235 compared with its 3TB desktop drive, which sells for $102. "However, even if there were no warranty, a 15% annual failure rate on the consumer desktop drive and a 0% failure rate on the enterprise drive, the breakeven would be 10 years, which is longer than we expect to even run the drives for." "Most of the drives we get have a 3-year warranty, making failures a non-issue from a cost perspective for that period," a Backblaze blog stated.
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