HDD/SDD reliability: on the rise?

[Jeff Butts]

For years, Backblaze has published a report each quarter on how many hard drive failures it's experienced. Now, you've gotta understand...Backblaze maintains hundreds of thousands of drives, and they're not all the exact same model. You've got WD, Seagate, Toshiba, and some I've never heard of.

So, 1Q24 is closed out, and Backblaze publishes its latest report. There's a lot of data to parse through, and I look at some of it over at groovyPost's main site. What's interesting, though, is they say the average age of failure increased from 1Q23 to 1Q24. They won't say it's a trend, since it's just one year compared to the other, but...maybe?

Whatcha think? Are our storage devices starting to last longer than they used to, or is this just...I dunno...a quirk of the numbers?

[Brian]

That's a lot of data. Backblaze is alright, but you can't configure what's backed up like other services.

[Steve Krause]

I wrote about the service a few years ago. I've recently updated the piece as I really enjoy the backup client. It's fairly inexpensive and backs up almost 3T for me on my main system.

Personally, I'd recommend these guys to family and friends. Regarding that report @Jeff Butts---I used a previous report a few years ago to help me pick an inexpensive 4T drive. I went with the HGST and it's been running great ever since. The performance vs. an SSD is terrible but, it's perfect as cold storage for photos and music.

Here's what I have stored on it - primarily as a backup to my NVME drives: