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Data from a company using over 40,000 hard drives
Excerpt:
High-Level Summary
With 40,000 hard drives, Backblaze knows a lot about the reliability of hard drives and shares the statistics:
- 78% of drives survive more than 4 years.
- The median hard drive survives 6 years.
- Drives have 3 distinct failure modes that follow a bathtub curve:
- Early “Infant Mortality” Failure
- Constant (Random) Failure
- Wear Out Failure
- As long as the temperature is within spec, reliability is not affected by heat.
- HGST drives are generally reliable; Seagate and Western Digital hard drives’ reliability vary by model. (see above cited web page for graphic)