Recently, Backblaze released the 2021 hard drive "quality report". Backblaze is a cloud storage and backup company, as of December 31, 2021, Backblaze managed 206928 hard disks, of which 3760 were startup disks, 203168 were data storage disks, excluding 409 hard disks that did not meet the sampling standard, and this data sampling included 202759 hard disks.
Among them, the Seagate 6TB hard drive with st6000DX000 has the lowest failure rate, with an annualized failure rate (AFR) of only 0.11%, a sampling number of 886 blocks, and an average use time of 80.4 months.
It was followed by western digital 16TB hard drives with model WUH721816ALE6L0, with an AFR of only 0.14%, a adoption quantity of 1767 blocks, and an average use time of 5.06 months.
Hitachi's 12TB hard drive with a model model HUH721212ALE600 ranks third with an AFR value of 0.27%, with a sampling number of 2600 blocks and an average use time of 27.04 months.
*AFR is calculated = (drive failure / (drive days / 365)) * 100
On the whole, the AFR value of all hard disks in 2021 is 1.01%, which is slightly higher than 0.93% in 2020, but it is still a lot lower than the 1.83% in 2019.
In terms of hard disk capacity, the 6TB product has the lowest AFR value, but it has the smallest number of hard disks and only one hard disk.
If 10,000 blocks is used as the sampling benchmark, the AFR of 12TB products with 60,252 blocks has the lowest AFR, which is 0.84%; in comparison, the 4TB hard disk AFR value is the highest, reaching 1.14%, second only to 2.26% of the 1192 10TB hard disks, but because the number of hard disks is less than 10,000, the latter is not taken into account.
Finally, since 2013, Backblaze has included all the hard disk models of AFR, in the author's opinion, the best performance is the Hitachi hard disk with an AFR value of 0.40%, the model is HMS5C4040BLE640, the capacity is 4TB, and the number of uses is 12703 blocks.
In addition, most of the hard drives used by Backblaze are enterprise-class hard drives, not consumer hard disks, and there is still a big difference between the two.