'Given we are always adding additional failed drives to our dataset, and retiring drive models along the way, we will continue to track the average failed age of our drive models and report back if we find anything interesting.' We were surprised by what our data told us, but a little math never hurt anyone,' Backblaze's blog says. 'When we first saw the Secure Data Recovery average failed age, we thought that 2 years and 10 months was too low. This is despite Backblaze currently using HDDs that are older than 2 years and 7 months. If Backblaze only looked at drives that it didn't use in its data centers anymore, there would be 3,379 drives across 35 models, and the average age of failure would be a bit longer at 2 years and 7 months.īackblaze said its results thus far 'are consistent' with Secure Data Recovery's March findings. The 17,155 drives examined include 72 different models and does not include failed boot drives, drives that had no SMART raw attribute data, or drives with out-of-bounds data. The company recorded each drive's failure date, model, serial number, capacity, failure, and SMART raw value. 2 years, 6 monthsīackblaze arrived at this age by examining all of its failed drives and their respective power-on hours. Among the 17,155 failed HDDs Backblaze examined, the average age at which the drives failed was 2 years and 6 months. Today, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company with a reputation for detailed HDD and SSD failure analysis, followed up Secure Data Recovery's report with its own research using a much larger data set. That seemed like a short life span, but considering the limited sample size and analysis in Secure Data Recovery's report, there was room for skepticism. It found the average time before failure among those drives to be 2 years and 10 months.

We recently covered a study by Secure Data Recovery, an HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery company, of 2,007 defective hard disk drives it received.

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