In 2013 Backblaze saw ~14% avg failure rate at 3 years 3 months. Drive useful life: 4 years, roughly.
In 2021, Backblaze saw ~14% failure rate at 7 years 9 months. Drive useful life: about 6 years.
That gave us what was a stable-seeming, old "replace drives at 5 years, or you're getting risky" rule of thumb (unless you prefer to replace on failure, of course).
In 2025, Backblaze saw ~5% failure rate at 10 years 3 months. Drive useful life: ~10 years, roughly!
I bought two WD Red 6TB drives for a NAS, and both failed within two years. That’s unusually bad in my experience. Across two other NAS systems I’ve used for 15–20 years, I’ve only replaced drives three times.
One failed drive was replaced with the same model, which doesn’t inspire much confidence. The other couldn’t be replaced, so I received a refund of the original €198 purchase price from 1.5 years ago. The exact same 6TB drive now costs around €340, a pretty steep increase. For the second drive I went with Seagate, fingers crossed.
Something that's interested me is how hard drive capacities have continuously gone up, but read and write speeds have not really changed. To the point where it would take multiple days to read these new high capacity drives.
I wonder what the use case for them is, they aren't ideal for RAID as they would take far too long to rebuild the array in a drive failure, but they also aren't great for long term cold storage. Perhaps they are ideal for periodic backups where you want to take a daily 1TB backup of a server or CCTV where you don't really care about backing up the data as it's all deleted on schedule anyway.
Spinning rust is still the only cost effective answer to redundant 10+ tb storage. If you have 4+ disks, use raid 6 or raid 10 and you get decent fault tolerance too. Raid 10 also increases write performance but it's a bit less robust imo and more expensive per gb.
As for speed it's mainly tied to rpm and the market decided no one wants higher failure rates / lower mtbf for marginal speed gains.
If you need speed and capacity, throw an ssd or two in front of a raid disk array for caching with primocache or whatever.
For one, home servers can go on maintenance mode (read only?) for a day or two, it will be fine most of the time.
In bigger applications, you have enough redundancy to allow one or two nodes to go down for a while. If a company had terabytes upon terabytes of critical data, having a multi-tiered storage would make sense, even of a full backup restore would take a days.on some tiers.
I imagine that there is a ton of data in the "would be nice to retain but not so critical as to warrant a constant backup" category. Alternatively stuff that requires large storage, but only occasional small writes, so incremental backups are feasible.
You use them for backups, data archiving, or object storage with triple parity RAID or erasure coding. The combined bandwidth of dozens to hundreds of magnetic hard drives is pretty decent.
I'm surprised Backblaze doesn't use host-managed SMR. I would expect that they'd already write data sequentially for speed and have different storage tiers (for "hot" data likely to be changed/deleted soon vs. data expected to stay for a long time). At least for large files in the cold tier SMR would make a lot of sense.
Until very recent price changes, at the scale that they purchase hard drives, I don't think that there would have been significant cost savings in purchasing SMR drives. Particularly after taking into account the additional hours of software development required to write custom host managed SMR stuff to deal with the performance problems.
Well i guess with the price of drives right now I learned one thing the drives i got in the last 5 years will probably hold out for a while longer. Maybe there is some hope of waiting out this supply shortage.
Since Backblaze publishes the stats, Seagate somehow doesn’t dare to put awfully bad drives on the market - ehm they did have a baaad track record. At least the ones monitored by BB seem to be performing well.
thx for posting this. Personally I am a fan of Western Digital Black Label spinning drives. Say what you will! I have details, and basically they work for me. AFAIK in 2026 and back into 2025, there are very large, new high-spec Western Digital Black Label disks in the catalog.. that I just cannot order. It says "all orders are pre-allocated until further notice" or similar ? Meanwhile, the same disks I bought ten years ago, same size, spec, performance and rating, as also available and I can buy those.. for perhaps twenty percent more than I paid long ago. This is new to me, this situation where an ordinary civilian cannot purchase the large drives, exclusive to "select customers" with opaque wording and no end in sight. The happy escalator of increasing spec and similar consumer prices, has ended.
Why am I reading the very newest Backblaze drive report -- they fired the over-forty engineer who started this, apparently.. and I as a consumer, cannot buy the same drives that might be listed there -- have not looked yet. The entire situation is fundementally changed. Info welcome
It makes me a little physically sick that writing, something I love, is now tainted by the constant nagging thought, "could somebody mistake that sentence as AI?"
Critics of this line of worrying tend to fall into the same category of irrationality/bias as the "just be yourself" advice-givers.
It is an interesting thought about how these AI-cliches will affect human-written text that will subsequently be used in training - thus perpetuating the cycle.
i guess, but to me its not so much "this is ai this is terrible" and more "i'm sick of hearing this phrase all the time". it's not that I never want to see an em-dash ever again, its just that i don't want them used every other sentence.
In 2021, Backblaze saw ~14% failure rate at 7 years 9 months. Drive useful life: about 6 years.
That gave us what was a stable-seeming, old "replace drives at 5 years, or you're getting risky" rule of thumb (unless you prefer to replace on failure, of course).
In 2025, Backblaze saw ~5% failure rate at 10 years 3 months. Drive useful life: ~10 years, roughly!
Thanks for all the HDD improvements, industry!
One failed drive was replaced with the same model, which doesn’t inspire much confidence. The other couldn’t be replaced, so I received a refund of the original €198 purchase price from 1.5 years ago. The exact same 6TB drive now costs around €340, a pretty steep increase. For the second drive I went with Seagate, fingers crossed.
I wonder what the use case for them is, they aren't ideal for RAID as they would take far too long to rebuild the array in a drive failure, but they also aren't great for long term cold storage. Perhaps they are ideal for periodic backups where you want to take a daily 1TB backup of a server or CCTV where you don't really care about backing up the data as it's all deleted on schedule anyway.
As for speed it's mainly tied to rpm and the market decided no one wants higher failure rates / lower mtbf for marginal speed gains.
If you need speed and capacity, throw an ssd or two in front of a raid disk array for caching with primocache or whatever.
In bigger applications, you have enough redundancy to allow one or two nodes to go down for a while. If a company had terabytes upon terabytes of critical data, having a multi-tiered storage would make sense, even of a full backup restore would take a days.on some tiers.
Most of the data on my NAS is of that form.
*AFR%-wise
Why am I reading the very newest Backblaze drive report -- they fired the over-forty engineer who started this, apparently.. and I as a consumer, cannot buy the same drives that might be listed there -- have not looked yet. The entire situation is fundementally changed. Info welcome
"That question is becoming more relevant as higher-capacity drives become more (dare we say) load bearing."
Critics of this line of worrying tend to fall into the same category of irrationality/bias as the "just be yourself" advice-givers.