Interesting article on life cycle of disk drives (both HDD and SSD)

[RichF]

Backblaze has a very interesting blog on the life span/cycle of disk drives. Besides from providing a great product they also provide valuable insights into life span of disks (which fail most frequently).

Drive Failure Over Time: The Bathtub Curve Is Leaking

Hard drive failure rates tend to follow the “bathtub curve.” What is this curve, and how does it indicate the drive failure rates at Backblaze?

www.backblaze.com

 

[MartyD]

I always look at the failure rate for specific drives from Backblaze when I am considering purchasing a new drive.

 

[RichF]

I always look at the failure rate for specific drives from Backblaze when I am considering purchasing a new drive.

So do I. Great information though at times it is not easy to find the specific models they use.

 

[NorthernFocus]

I did a lot of reliability work in my career including industrial control systems. So a while back when trying to decide on external hard drives I looked up data on hard drive failure rates. What I found was that high failure rates tended to be model specific rather than manufacturer specific. So data for drives in commercial applications did not translate to consumer products. The only conclusion I came to was not to buy the newest products because it is basically a crap shoot whether there will be reliability issues on any new models. Better to wait until a product has been in the market long enough to generate some reliability data.

On a similar topic a couple of years ago when I was in the market for a new laptop I did some research on failure rates. I typically replace laptops every three or four years so I was mainly interested in the left side of the bathtub curve, the infant mortality rate. Bottom line I found that there was no statistically significant difference in the failure rates of any of the PC manufacturers. The only outlier was Apple which had about 15 percent fewer failures than the PCs. I won't quote the actual numbers because I didn't keep the data and it's been a couple of years ago.