last updated 5 May 2023

Now could be a great time to switch from HDD to SSDs

The balance of power between HDDs and SSDs could soon be about to shift for good, new figures have claimed.

Backblaze, which has been monitoring the failure rate of its hard drives over the course of a decade, has just announced its latest figures analyzing over 241,000 units.

Accounting for test drives and models with fewer than 60 in operation, Backblaze’s Q1 2023 report uncovered statistics from 236,893 drives, spanning 30 models from four manufacturers that account for almost 2.8 million TB of storage.

Are HDDs reliable?
According to its Q1 2023 figures, the hard drives used by Backblaze (some of which in operation for a number of years) are becoming less reliable, averaging an annualized failure rating of 1.54%, compared with 1.21% in the previous quarter.

This is a sharp increase on the 1.37% figure reported for 2022 as a whole, itself up from 1.01% in 2021 and 0.93% in 2020.

... It also marked Seagate as having the highest AFR of 2.28% compared with WDC on the opposite end of the scale, at 0.31%.

Age is another variable quoted by the company, with some of its drives not failing until their fifth year, and others in their first few months.