Backblaze is a company that the SSD Guy blog has meant to discuss for some time now, because for the past decade or longer the company has been very openly publishing reliability information on its large fleet of hundreds of thousands of HDDs and SSDs. Backblaze is an impartial observer that provides a very useful way of comparing different manufacturers, different models, and HDD stats vs. SSD stats.
Fortunately, all of the many suppliers and models that Backblaze has used produce very reliable products. Of the 284,386 HDDs evaluated in 2Q24, only 1,197 failed, representing a total annual average failure rate of 1.71%. Failure rates for individual models ranged from a high of 11.89% all the way down to 0.00%, with two of the 25 models in the report exhibiting zero failures during the quarter. Interestingly enough, all three of these were from the same manufacturer!
This isn’t Backblaze’s actual business, though. The company’s mission is to archive other companies’ data securely and cost-effectively. According to Backblaze: “Architected for 11 nines of durability, Backblaze safeguards exabytes of data storage for hundreds of thousands of businesses and individuals around the world.” That mission requires a lot of drives running around the clock without failure, so they obsess about the reliability of their media.
What the SSD Guy finds intriguing, though, is that they publish quarterly reliability data. Quarterly HDD reliability updates can be found HERE, although the SSD data is published less frequently and is a little more difficult to locate. The 2023 mid-year SSD report can be found HERE. Since all of it is reported by Andy Klein, Backblaze’s “Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller,” then both sets of stats can be found by going to his profile page.
Here’s a little secret: When Objective Analysis needs HDD or SSD reliability stats for a report, presentation, or article, we go to Backblaze (giving them credit, of course!) It’s quality sources like this that help make our information so good, and that allow us to form rock-solid positions. We do that with all of our data, and that data, those positions, and our reports can be an enormous help to your company as you put together your own strategies. Contact us to explore how we can work together to provide you with the most successful foundation for your own company’s strategies.