Seagate 12TB HDD: 7.46% failure rate and 1.5 year lifespan

Seagate 12TB HDD: 7.46% failure rate and 1.5 year lifespan.

Cloud service provider: The average lifespan of a faulty mechanical hard drive is only 2.5 years Western Digital is the most reliable

News on May 5th, every once in a while, the large cloud service provider Backblaze will publish the reliability report of the mechanical hard disk they use.

Of course, the environment, load, and intensity of cloud services are far from those of ordinary users, so they cannot be used as authoritative conclusions, but they also have certain reference value.

As of the end of the first quarter of 2023, Backblaze managed a total of 236,893 mechanical hard drives. Excluding those that cannot be started, those with incomplete SMART information, and abnormal data, a total of 17,155 hard drives have failed, and their average usage time is only 2 years and 6 months. , less than 3 years of warranty.

Of course, most hard drives can be used normally for many years, so the overall average lifespan is much longer than 2 years and 6 months, don’t be confused.

The average failure rate of hard drives used by Backblaze is 1.54% in the first quarter of 2023 , which is 0.33 percentage points higher than that in the fourth quarter of last year and 0.32 percentage points higher than that in the first quarter of last year.

But the specific reason is hard to determine. It may be a problem of a certain model or a certain batch, or it may be the influence of the installation and use environment.

In terms of brands, the average annual failure rate of Seagate hard drives is 2.28%, which is far ahead, followed by HGST 1.11%, Toshiba 0.93%, and the lowest is Western Digital, which is only 0.31%.

However, Backblaze emphasized that these failure rates are acceptable , even Seagate means that only 2 out of every 100 hard drives fail.

In terms of models, excluding less than 50 cases, there are a total of 30 hard drives that frequently fail, including 13 models of Seagate, 7 models of HGST, 7 models of Toshiba, and 3 models of Western Digital.

Five of the six hard drives with the highest failure rate are from Seagate, and the top three are all from Seagate.

The highest is ST12000NM0007 12TB, 2023 blocks were damaged, the average failure rate reached 7.46%, and the average lifespan was only 1 year and 6 months.

The second place is ST1400NM0138 14TB , with an average failure rate of 6.23%; the third place is ST10000NM0086 10TB , with an average failure rate of 4.85%.

It was followed by HGST HUH728080ALE604 8TB 4.33%, Seagate ST4000DM000 4TB 3.80%, Seagate ST8000NM0055 8TB 3.72%.

Backblaze also pointed out that the failure rate of large-capacity hard drives is generally lower than that of small-capacity models , and they no longer use 1TB, 1.5TB, 2TB, 3TB and other small-capacity hard drives, and even 5TB has been eliminated.

Interestingly, the previous statistics of the data recovery company Secure Data Recovery showed that the average lifespan of a mechanical hard drive is 2 years and 10 months , which is quite close to the conclusion of Backblaze.

However, in the brand statistics of Secure Data Recovery, Toshiba is the best, with an average lifespan of nearly 4 years, the worst is Hitachi, with an average lifespan of only 2 years and 1 month, Seagate and Western Digital are 2 years, 8 months, and 2 years respectively 11 months.

Therefore, you don’t need to take the above data and your own usage situation to sit in the seat. After all, the product coverage, operating status, usage environment, and statistical methods are completely different, and they are for reference only.