The Blackblaze company has once again compiled a list with the hard drives that fail the most and have the least useful life. This is something to which we are accustomed, since it is a report that they usually bring to light every year. Well, on this occasion, until December 31, 2022, some 230,921 HDD units from different brands such as Seagate or Toshiba were examined.
Therefore, thanks to this report we now know which drives have failed the most over the past year, as well as those hard drives with the least durability. And while almost all drives have had more failures, there have been some that have failed more than others. It all depends on the model and brand.
In addition, having collected the data for the last year, the company already allows us to see how the drives have evolved throughout 2022. So we can see the annual failure rate of these hard drives that have been analyzed.
The worst HDDs
In this 2022 report, which they shared this week, Blackblaze lets us see how they have examined 230,921 hard drives. Specifically, we find up to 29 models from brands such as HGST, Seagate, Toshiba and WDC . These hard drives that they have verified have a memory capacity ranging from 4 TB of storage to 16 TB.
In this analysis, the company makes it clear to us that the oldest storage units are the ones that fail the most when grouping by size. Most notable of all, only a Seagate 8TB drive ( model: ST8000NM000A ) was the only model that had zero issues .
However, Seagate is the brand with the highest failure rate percentage during 2022. In addition, another factor must be taken into account, they are not the Seagate units that accumulated the most days of use. On the other hand, the rates of HGST, Toshiba and WDC are much lower. In fact, there are only four Toshiba models and two from HGST that exceed 1% annual failure rate, the rest of the models of these three brands drop below 1%.
How has it changed from one year to the next?
The global annual failure rate increased compared to 2021. While in 2021 it was 1.01%, in 2022 it rose to 1.37% . This is because the different storage units that have been used have been aging. Therefore, the older they are, the more likely they are to fail.
In fact, during 2022, they had to add new models. Two 8TB models to replace other failed 8TB drives and three 16TB models added to the list. Another important detail is that, from one year to the next, the failure rate has only dropped in 16TB drives (-0.07%). The rest of the drives have increased the percentage of failures, being the Seagate 10 TB drive that has risen the most from one year to the next.
Finally, as we can see in the failure graph, the drive that presented the most failures throughout 2022 was the 14 TB Seagate (ST14000NM0138) with 5.70%, followed by the 8 TB HGST drive (HUH728080ALE604 ) at 5.25% and the Seagate 12TB (ST12000NM0007) at 4.75%.