Cloud storage service BackBlaze reports that 8TB hard disk drives have lower failure rates than lower capacity drives. The number of failed disks also decreased compared to previous years.
BackBlaze provides quarterly reports on the large number of HDDs the company has in use. The report on all four quarters of 2016 shows that 1.65% of the 8TB drives failed compared to an overall average of 1.94%. The company mainly uses Seagate's consumer HDDs and some HGST enterprise drives.
The majority of Backblaze's HDD lineup consists of Seagate ST4000DM000 drives, 34,738 of the company's 71,939 hard disk drives is of this model, which is about 48%. This model has a much higher failure rate than the 8,660 Seagate 8TB drives.
It seems the company was smart to only buy a handful of Seagate's other 4TB mode, the ST4000DX000 which has a failure rate of 13.57%.
The overall hard drive failure rate for 2016 was 1.95% or 0.53% less than in 2015 and 4.44% less than the failure rate in 2014.
On average the company has to replace 5 disks per working day.
