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 remember back in the late nineties / early 2000s drive failures really were pretty common. During my childhood I think I had three. I've never had a catastrophic failure since then, really came a long way.
> I remember back in the late nineties / early 2000s drive failures really were pretty common.
Yup. And most people wouldn't bother but typically you could RMA HDDs: the terms were quite generous. I was in Europe and did learn, as a teenager, how to RMA HDDs to get shiny replacements (IIRC for example for Seagate HDDs I'd send them to the Netherlands and then after a few weeks I'd get a new one by the mail).
My father was deep into photography in that era and digitized all his photos. He was understandably paranoid about drive failures. The solution? ZIP disks everywhere! Cue massive family stress when the disk containing his competition entry was nowhere to be found and definitely in one of the kids rooms. It was, of course, found 3 days later in the glove box of his truck (thank you for reading my lowercase-t trauma dump).
realityfactchex · · focus · HN ↗
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!
mzhaase · · focus · HN ↗
mrlonglong · · focus · HN ↗
Pretty crap.
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
OptionOfT · · focus · HN ↗
gandreani · · focus · HN ↗
TacticalCoder · · focus · HN ↗
Yup. And most people wouldn't bother but typically you could RMA HDDs: the terms were quite generous. I was in Europe and did learn, as a teenager, how to RMA HDDs to get shiny replacements (IIRC for example for Seagate HDDs I'd send them to the Netherlands and then after a few weeks I'd get a new one by the mail).
anthomtb · · focus · HN ↗