In Q3 2017, Backblaze introduced both 10 TB and 12 TB hard drives into their data centers and added over 59 petabytes of data storage, bringing their total storage capacity to 400 petabytes. These drives are still new, so there isn’t much insight to be gleaned from them so far, but the company does have more to say about consumer vs. enterprise drives based on their consistency in failure rate.



The hard drive failure rate for the quarter was 1.84%, our lowest quarterly rate ever. There are several factors that contribute to this, but one that stands out is the average age of the hard drives in use. Only the 4 TB HGST drives (model: HDS5C4040ALE630) have an average age over 4 years — 51.3 months to be precise. The average age of all the other drive models is less than 4 years, with nearly 80% of all of the drives being less than 3 years old.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for Q3 2017