How Long Do Hard Drives Last? [Chart]

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Posted November 12, 2013 at 9:45pm by iClarified · 25737 views

Backblaze, a online backup company, has released a report that offers data on how long hard drives last. Backblaze has over 25,000 disk drives spinning at all times. Over 74% of the drives they've purchased live longer than four years, meaning 26% of drives fail in their first four years of use.

Backblaze calculated three distinct failure rates:
● For the first 1.5 years, drives fail at 5.1% per year.
● For the next 1.5 years, drives fail LESS, at about 1.4% per year.
● After 3 years though, failures rates skyrocket to 11.8% per year.

The chart below shows that nearly 80% of all drives Backblaze has purchased are still operational.

Blackblaze has been running for five years and so doesn't have data for drives older than that; however, they extrapolated the line from the previous chart to estimate the point at which half of the drives have died, determining that, "The median lifespan of a drive will be over 6 years."

Many more details in the full report linked below...

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ios3d - November 17, 2013 at 9:35pm

some real engineer will introduce oiling system some day, let's hope

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Truffol - November 14, 2013 at 7:29am

This shows the importance of cloud storage doesn't it? Not only does it provide multi-screen access, security is another important factor as you'll never have to back up...

Not try to be hard - November 13, 2013 at 5:47am

How long do Hard on Last ? Depending to age and subject lol

Kr00 - November 13, 2013 at 2:36am

Laptop HDD's fail more often than a desktop or tower, as many carry them around while they're running, tempting the hard drive gods. Kids laptops fail 10 times more than any other user. That being said, I have a 2001 iMac that still runs today, on the original HD.

stokerino - November 13, 2013 at 1:48am

Needs several qualifiers....especially to do with actual use. Their HDDs are spinning 24/7. Mine spin a couple of hours every week. At that rate, mine should last a couple of lifetimes.

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