Backblaze release its 2016 Q2 HDD reliability results
Backblaze continues to blaze forward with its personal and business backups and cloud storage solutions. The company has experienced steady growth since its conception in 2007 with their personal and enterprise level backup solutions, and more recently with its B2 Cloud Storage options. Backblaze, who has a history of transparency with their products and numbers, has released their Q2 2016 stats for their hard drives.
The results are promising, showing that their new 8TB drives are doing well, with lower than expected failure rates. HGST and Seagate make up a majority of their drives, ranging from 2TB to 8TB, but we'll be focusing on the failure rates of the new HGST and Seagate 8TB data drives.
While not a definitive measurement, hard drives are typically measured by the "bathtub curve." This curve basically says that hard drives have the highest chance of failure at the beginning of their life cycle (due to manufacturing errors) and at the end of their life cycle (due to typical wear and tear of the drives). Both the HGST and Seagate drives performed exceptionally well, with failure rates of 3.2% and 3.3%, respectively. If these early indicators are any gauge of the quality of these new 8TB drives, then Backblaze is set to have extremely low failure rates through the life cycle of the drives.
While the HGST hard drives have a slightly lower failure rate than the Seagate drives, Seagate continues to dominate their cloud storage racks due to the affordability and availability of the drives.
Check out the graph below for an in depth look at the 2016 Q2 hard drive failures for Backblaze.
Cloud storage continues to grow in popularity and usefulness, and Backblaze continues to grow, as well. But what does the future hold for cloud storage? Backblaze has put together a nice infographic, detailing interesting stats of the present and where cloud storage is going in the future. Check out the graph from Backblaze below.
