As of December 31, 2020, Backblaze has 165,530 drives under supervision, with an additional 39,792 drives added that year. There were a total of 162,530 data drives and 3,000 boot drives. First, we'll look at the data drive failure rates for the models in our data centres as of the end of December. We'll talk about the boot drives later on in the report. Also, we'll see our first 16TB and 18TB drives and have western digital external hard drive back at the farm. We invite your feedback in the form of comments as we go along to share our thoughts and views on the facts provided. 

How Often Hard Drives Break-in 2020 

Backblaze was keeping tabs on 162,530 data storage hard disks as 2020 came to a close. We did not include 231 drives in our assessment because they were only utilised for testing or because we needed to have 60 of that model's drives available. In 2020, we will have 162,299 ssd internal hard drive, as seen below. 

Observations 

Out of the 231 drives that weren't on the list, either they weren't utilised for testing, or there weren't 60 of the same model at any point in the year. The internal hard drive Test Data website allows users to download the data for all drives, including data drives, boot drives, and more. 

Any inferences on failure rates of drives with less than 250,000 drive days are unwarranted. We cannot draw any inferences from the data collected over a year. Because we want to be thorough, we only show models with fewer than 250,000 drive days. 

The Seagate 6TB drive (ST6000DX000) has the best annualised failure rate (AFR) among drive models, with more than 250,000 drive days in 2020, at 0.23%. When looking at average age, this model was also the oldest of the listed drives. 

Updates for the Year 2020 

At the start of 2020, we set out to increase the variety of drive models that could be used in our data centres. So, as you can see below, we qualified nine new drive models throughout the year. 

The 2020 harvest saw the addition of two more hard drive models to our inventory: a 16 TB Seagate (ST16000NM005G) drive with 26 drives and a 16 TB Toshiba (MG08ACA16TA) with 40 drives. Each fell below our 60-drive criterion and was should have betted.

Bring about diversity

As the consequences of COVID-19 started to make their way into the global economy in March 2020, the objective of certifying more drive models turned out to be a prophetic accomplishment in 2020. Then, we were well on our way to achieving our purpose. Although drive model diversification was less inventive of a solution than drive farming, it was one of the strategies we employed to manage our supply chain in the face of the manufacturing and shipping delays common during the first few months of the pandemic.