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!
This is broadly consistent with my own experience at smaller scale. Out of a dozen or so 2TB HGST drives in use for 10+ years (mostly Ultrastar SATA, with a few Deskstars that may or may not be mechanically identical), I've had only one failure, and that was of a bare drive that was outside my control, so I have no idea how it was handled. And this was in a dusty environment with no air conditioning, not a datacenter.
Likewise with SSDs. Given their slightly more write intensive than ordinary desktop workloads, I'm reasonably confident that the capacitors in my 10-year-old enterprise SSDs (HGST SAS with Intel flash) will fail before the flash.
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!
jasomill · · focus · HN ↗
Likewise with SSDs. Given their slightly more write intensive than ordinary desktop workloads, I'm reasonably confident that the capacitors in my 10-year-old enterprise SSDs (HGST SAS with Intel flash) will fail before the flash.