Backblaze releases their HDD failure rates

[pharma]

Backblaze Publishes Q1 2023 Hard Drive Failure Rate Report, 2-3 Year Average Life Expectancy

Backblaze has supplied the newest update to their Hard Drive Failure Rates statistics which covers the first quarter of 2023.

wccftech.com

The AFR, or annualized failure rate, for the first quarter this year was 1.54%, which increased by .33% from the previous quarter. Andy Klein, Backblaze's author of the report, notes that the AFR quarterly numbers "can be volatile" but can also be helpful to see if a trend appears in the future.

For instance, HGST (model HUH721212ALN604), Seagate (ST12000NM0007), and Western Digital (WDC, model WUH721414ALE6L4) all had a substantial AFR increase, with the first company seeing 246%, the second 138%, and WDC seeing 242% AFR quarterly increases. All three drives are 12 TB in size or above.

 

[pcchen]

The "2-3 year average life expectancy" number is a bit misleading as it's from failed devices. From their AFR number it's quite obvious that the majority of devices are still alive and probably already being used for more than 3 years.
Of course, even so it's still a very good idea to make sure to backup everything important.