Backblaze is a backup and cloud storage company that has been tracking the annualized failure rates (AFRs) of the hard drives in its datacenter since 2013. As you can imagine, that’s netted the firm a lot of data. And that data has led the company to conclude that HDDs “are lasting longer” and showing fewer errors.
That conclusion came from a blog post this week by Stephanie Doyle, Backblaze’s writer and blog operations specialist, and Pat Patterson, Backblaze’s chief technical evangelist. The authors compared the AFRs for the approximately 317,230 drives in Backblaze’s datacenter to the AFRs the company recorded when examining the 21,195 drives it had in 2013 and 206,928 drives in 2021. Doyle and Patterson said they identified “a pretty solid deviation in both age of drive failure and the high point of AFR from the last two times we’ve run the analyses.”
This is a fascinating overview of HDD reliability and the insights gained from your long-term analysis. It’s impressive to see how data can inform our understanding of technology trends over time. Thanks for sharing this valuable information!
I completely agree; it’s impressive how data over the years can reveal such important trends. The bathtub curve really highlights the critical phases of HDD life, and understanding these can help users make more informed decisions about their storage solutions. It’s interesting to think about how these insights could evolve with newer technologies like SSDs in the future!
Absolutely, it’s fascinating how long-term data can highlight reliability patterns like the bathtub curve. It’s also interesting to consider how these insights might influence future HDD designs and storage solutions.