Data backup and cloud storage company Backblaze has released its 2022 annual hard drive failure report. This report provides insight into the reliability of hard drives. hard drives (HDD) as they are still used by millions of users and servers.
The company analyzed 230,921 hard drives and found that Seagate’s Exos 8TB had no failures in 2022. However, the company that did the study only had 79 of these drives in use for its metrics and these drives had only been in use for 22,000 days and were primarily used for backup to replace failed units.
However, the two models that failed the most were the HGST Ultrastar He8 de 8 TB and the Seagate 14TB Exos X14, which had failure rates of 5.27% and 5.70%, respectively. But it is important to take into account the sample size for these models, which was very low.
The annualized failure rate of hard drives has increased in recent years, and in 2022 it reached 1.37%. This is due to the aging of the drives, they explain in the report, as they become more prone to failure over time.
HDDs continue to be used despite the improvement in SDD prices
If we look at the Backblaze graph, the Seagate brand is the one with the highest percentage failure rate with 1.87% failures in the last quarter of 2022. Instead, the one that failed the least was Western Digital with 0.2% of the units presenting failures or errors.
By Toshibathe other storage giant, this arrived at a 0.82% failure rate and the fourth in discord, HGST, reached a very low 0.51%. In this way it is clear that only Seagate exceeds 1% in defective units. In general terms they are very good numbers.
The curious thing about all this is that there are users and companies that decide to continue betting on HDDs when in recent years the price and storage capacities of SSD they have gone down so much. Right now it is viable to buy a 500 GB SSD for 40 euros.
Removing drives with a lot of storage (8TB and up), SSDs can do the job of any HDD more efficiently, more reliably, and quieter, which is why traditional hard drives—and Seagate—are losing share from a decade ago.
