 |
Backblaze has released its data set for the full year 2018 and there are some surprises in it this time around.
Annual failure rates for drives have fallen sharply in comparison with previous years as smaller-capacity HDDs have been replaced by higher-capacity counterparts. This isn’t automatically what you’d expect.
The Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) has fallen every year since 2016, from 1.95 percent to 1.25 percent. That’s a significant decline.
Importantly, while this trend doesn’t hold true for every drive family, there are multiple HDDs that show lower AFRs in 2018 than in 2016. Seagate’s 10TB drive family has been particularly good, with a 0.33 percent AFR for 2018, improving on the already-low 0.89 percent AFR for 2017.
For those of you wanting an AFR comparison that stretches back farther than 2016, Backblaze has provided that data as well.
The following is the AFR rating for HDDs
from 4/20/2013 through 12/31/2018 for all drives still active as of 12/31/2018.