In its Tenth Year, the Latest Edition of Flagship Report Focuses on the Upper Limits of the Lifespan of Hard Drives
Backblaze,, the industry’s leading specialized cloud storage platform, released the “Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2023” report, an exclusive source of data and authoritative resource for storage buyers due to its detail, transparency and historical data.
Backblaze’s quarterly analytics report is based on 240,940 hard drives under their management across 31 different models, focusing on the quarterly and l******* failure rates as of the end of Q2 2023 (April 1 – June 30, 2023). The biggest change was that the average failure rate (AFR) for Q2 2023 was 2.28%, up from 1.54% in Q1 2023.
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This rise was expected as the age of the fleet continues to increase and is not necessarily a cause for concern given the inescapable reality of the cloud storage business is that drives fail. The primary drives (by size) which are “driving” the increased l******* annualized failure rate are the 8TB and 10TB drives, which were some of the oldest drives managed by Backblaze.
“For the past ten years we’ve been capturing our Drive Stats report data to inform our own purchasing strategies as one of the many inputs into understanding our environment so we can adjust when and as we need,” said Andy Klein, principal cloud storage storyteller at Backblaze. “We take pride in having nothing to hide and the sunshine from sharing it with the public makes us better at what we do.”
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Drive Failure Rates Enable Predictive Maintenance
This failure rate data opens new strategic opportunities for Backblaze and other organizations analyzing the data from the report. Understanding when certain drives will likely reach their end-of-life enables predictive maintenance – saving time otherwise spent on rebuilding a failed drive which in turn helps maintain the durability of the storage environment. This is especially true as drives get bigger. A failed one terabyte (TB) drive typically requires one day to rebuild, but a 16 TB drive could take several weeks. However, a 16TB drive on the verge of failing can be cloned in a matter of days. This knowledge is highly valuable for small businesses with a handful of server racks as well as Fortune 500s who need to manage entire server farms.
Preparing for Future Condition and Location Analysis
Most intriguing in this report is how Backblaze will be tracking the location of individual drives within each server rack and Backblaze Vault to determine how different environmental conditions and servers impact drive durability. This collection began in Q2 2023 and initial analysis will be shared later once more data is compiled for deeper comprehension.
Moving forward, Backblaze will be able to determine if certain storage servers are more prone to drive failure or if certain drive models work better or worse in certain storage servers. This can help better inform enterprise storage strategies beyond individual drive purchases to improve server performance and data availability, such as where to purchase third-party cloud/data-center storage and how to best assemble servers.
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