Measured Hard Drive Risk

Written By charlie butterworth

Actual failure rates of hard drives is the best data for estimating the risk of where your data is stored, and helps us to:

  • Recommend the right product

  • Determine when to upgrade

  • Reconfigure systems to improve protection on old drives and extend their useful life.

  • Provide meaningful compliance reporting

Drive Failure Rates Chart

Annual Failure Rates From Industry Data

Solid lines show mean failure rates, dashed lines show ±1 standard deviation

Data sources: Backblaze quarterly reports (HDD), Google's "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" (HDD), and Meta's "A Study of SSD Reliability in Large Scale Enterprise Storage Deployments" (SSD). AFR = Annualized Failure Rate.

Dashed lines represent ±1 standard deviation from the mean value. For Backblaze, these are derived from their published confidence intervals. For Google and Meta, these are approximated from available data in their reports.

Note: These values represent fleet-wide averages across many drive models and manufacturers. Individual drive models may perform better or worse than these aggregated statistics.

charlie butterworth
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