These are hard drives most likely to fail
Many factors can affect your computer’s performance, including viruses and malware. But before you panic, check your hard drive. The closer you get to its maximum capacity, the slower your computer will run. Here’s how much free space you need.
Computer components don’t last forever, and this is especially true for those with moving parts. Though solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming more commonplace, older machines and budget-priced newer computers still use the old standard hard disk drives (HDDs).
Whether you’re working on a 10-year-old computer or are in the market for a new one, here’s how long you can expect your HDD to last.
The study
You may not give a second thought to your hard drive, but if it fails, you can lose everything: photos, videos, work documents, notes — you name it.
Backblaze, a backup and storage company, just released its 2022 report on hard drive failure rates. The study involved 230,921 drives and included data going back three years to 2020.
There are many factors to consider here, such as how many examples of each drive there were, how long Backblaze had them, and how much use the drives saw.
Think of it like this: 20,000 examples (drive count) of one type of drive with an average age of 14 months will see more use (drive days) than 1,500 examples of another drive with an average age of 25 months.
With that being said, let’s look at some highlights:
- Only one drive had no failures: the 8TB Seagate (mode: ST8000NM000A). But they only had 79 of these drives in service with a low number of drive days.
- The 6TB Seagate (model ST6000DX000) drive is the oldest, with an average age of 92.5 months. In 2021, it had an annualized failure rate (AFR) of just 0.11%, which worsened to 0.68% in 2022. These are still some excellent stats.
- The 4TB Toshiba (model MD04ABA400V) drives have an average age of 91.3 months. In 2021, this drive had an AFR of 2.04%, which climbed to 3.13% for 2022 (including three drive failures). This is not bad, either.
- The 16TB Western Digital (model WUH721816ALE6L0), had just a 0.14% AFR in 2021, which improved to 0.12% in 2022. Good stats, but keep in mind that the average age here is just 14.9 months.
- The 14TB Seagate (model ST14000NM0138) had a high AFR of 4.79% in 2021, which went up to 5.7% in 2022. The average age for these drives was 24.8 months.
- HGST drives, which are typically pricier and harder to find, did well. The 12TB HGST (model HUH72712ALE600) had an AFR of 0.27% in 2021 and 2022, with an average age of 38.9 months. Impressive.
Here’s the three-year comparison of hard drive failure rates:
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