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 find the upgrade quite surprising. I would have expected them to be mature already in 2013. Or maybe there is change in selection. Blackblaze did go for cheap drives before. But with most users moving to SSD as default drive maybe overall HDDs have moved to more reliable segment. As in lower quality drives are just not made for desktops in mass volumes.
Part of it was drive quality. The 2011 flood that impacted Western Digital[1] caused them to buy a lot of lower-quality Seagate drives which affected their stats for years.
But I think part of it is the modern densities have less tolerance for manufacturing issues, so if the disks work they work well. Kinda like the Mars rovers which only had to work 90 days but they really had to work, so they ended up working for years.
> modern densities have less tolerance for manufacturing issues, so if the disks work they work well
Backblaze even showed with their statistics that the "bathtub curve" is dead - new drives have a barely lower failure rate than middle-aged drives <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/blog/drive-failure-over-time-the-bathtub-curve-is-leaking/" rel="nofollow">https://www.backblaze.com/blog/drive-failure-over-time-the-b...
It isn't that it is dead, it is just pushed out really really far. So the bathtub curve turns into, "if it survives birth, it lives forever"
Well, until the tail of the bathtub, which still seems to be there, but more of a wide dyke rather then a sharp and tall bathtub-edge. Which is father away than it used to be.
Drives still have a meaningful average working life is what I see in te data. There's just barely any infant mortality left.
The term "bathtub curve" came from the fact that typically hard disks had a lot of early deaths in the first year right out of the factory, hence a graph of hard drive death age would have a high side on the left (brand new drives dying) and a high side on the right (old drives dying), and during the average lifetime the drives were reliable, so the curve was shaped like a bathtub (high sides, flat bottom).
This lead to a lot of people doing things like intensive burn-in cycles for a week to test new drives before putting them in their machines.
When there are no longer early deaths (the "left" side of the bathtub), it's just "old things wear out" which doesn't have a special word for it.
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!
Ekaros · · focus · HN ↗
magicalhippo · · focus · HN ↗
But I think part of it is the modern densities have less tolerance for manufacturing issues, so if the disks work they work well. Kinda like the Mars rovers which only had to work 90 days but they really had to work, so they ended up working for years.
[1]: <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-flood-on-the-diskdrive-market" rel="nofollow">https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-flood-on-the-diskdrive-market
kalleboo · · focus · HN ↗
Backblaze even showed with their statistics that the "bathtub curve" is dead - new drives have a barely lower failure rate than middle-aged drives <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/blog/drive-failure-over-time-the-bathtub-curve-is-leaking/" rel="nofollow">https://www.backblaze.com/blog/drive-failure-over-time-the-b...
genxy · · focus · HN ↗
brnt · · focus · HN ↗
Drives still have a meaningful average working life is what I see in te data. There's just barely any infant mortality left.
kalleboo · · focus · HN ↗
This lead to a lot of people doing things like intensive burn-in cycles for a week to test new drives before putting them in their machines.
When there are no longer early deaths (the "left" side of the bathtub), it's just "old things wear out" which doesn't have a special word for it.
bayindirh · · focus · HN ↗
The tub has not disappeared, but its shallower and longer.