The steadiness of energy between HDDs and SSDs may quickly be about to shift for good, new figures have claimed.

Backblaze, which has been monitoring the failure fee of its laborious drives over the course of a decade, has simply introduced its newest figures analyzing over 241,000 models.

Accounting for take a look at drives and fashions with fewer than 60 in operation, Backblaze’s Q1 2023 report uncovered statistics from 236,893 drives, spanning 30 fashions from 4 producers that account for nearly 2.eight million TB of storage.

Are HDDs dependable?

In keeping with its Q1 2023 figures, the laborious drives utilized by Backblaze (a few of which in operation for numerous years) have gotten much less dependable, averaging an annualized failure ranking of 1.54%, in contrast with 1.21% within the earlier quarter.

This can be a sharp enhance on the 1.37% determine reported for 2022 as a complete, itself up from 1.01% in 2021 and 0.93% in 2020.

Whereas information is restricted and we can’t deduce whether or not drive dimension performs a job in failure, Backlaze’s 10TB HDDs had been essentially the most affected, with bigger drives faring higher.

It additionally marked Seagate as having the best AFR of two.28% in contrast with WDC on the alternative finish of the size, at 0.31%.

Age is one other variable quoted by the corporate, with a few of its drives not failing till their fifth 12 months, and others of their first few months. It does, nonetheless, estimate a mean age for failure at two to a few years, in keeping with its personal and Safe Information Restoration analysis.

The corporate’s rising variety of SSDs is starting to indicate their true reliability as compared, although information remains to be a number of 1000’s of terabytes away from that of HDDs. Nonetheless, a 2022 AFR of 0.98% is down from 1.05% in 2021, making SSDs typically extra dependable than their HDD counterparts.

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