Hard Drives Fail

How often they do will surprise you!

It used to be a “hard drive” was a 12-hour road trip with your kids.? Computers have changed our vocabulary.? Now we use the term to refer to the disk storage in our computer.? And hard drives are a huge improvement from what came before: floppy disks.? Remember those?? I spent hours typing my 9th grade science paper on my Apple II computer and saved it on a floppy disk.? Not sure what happened, but when I tried to retrieve it so I could print and turn it in, it was not there. I guess I got faster at typing since I re-keyed the whole paper.

Imagine my shock when I started reading hard drive AFRs or Annual Failure Rates.? Spoiler alert: they average out to well above 1.00% across multiple manufacturers and drive types.? I’m using data from internet hosting company Backblaze, which owns and carefully monitors nearly 270,000 hard drives.? ?Here are some more detailed stats:

• Backblaze found an AFR of…
• 1.01% in 2021
• 1.37% in 2022
• 1.70% in 2023
• I had a harder time finding good statistics for consumer grade hard drives (what you’d buy in a laptop for you or one of your kids as opposed to an enterprise-grade product.)? Nobody keeps records the way Backblaze does, and almost nobody has as many hard drives to manage as they do.
• Between 2018 and 2022, 1.38 billion hard drives shipped.? That means that across the board, 13.8 million of those will fail this year.? Whether it’s in a game pc, or the reservation center at your favorite airline, or the Department of Defense.? Noone is immune.

Statistics are great, but what does this all mean??

• Simply put, you have roughly a 1 in 100 chance of losing the data on your hard drive in any given year.
• If you own a business with 100 computers, odds are you’ll lose a hard drive to failure every year.? And (to make it more fun) you can’t select whether this will be on a server that’s critical or on a computer you don’t really need.

The ONLY way to protect yourself is backups.? Good backups that are tested as often as possible.? Even daily, as Verified Backups does for some types of data.

Let’s talk! To book a call with me, please visit https://VerifiedBackups.as.me