Backblaze’s Q2 2023 drive stats show the bathtub curve is holding up

Storage providers have to make costly decisions about which drives to buy and when, considering factors like efficiency, reliability, and lifespan. So, it’s helpful that Backblaze continues to release quarterly reports on the status of its fleet of over 240,000 drives.

In the Q2 2023 edition of its drive stats report, the storage provider gave a fresh look at how its drives are doing. It also announced it would be tracking new variables that could give operators more insight into what might be affecting the health of specific hard disk drive models.

Backblaze’s findings were broadly consistent with prior releases that confirmed the “bathtub curve,” or the pattern by which drives tend to either fail soon after installation or after a longer period of service. However, their fleet had a spike in annualized failure rates compared to the first quarter of 2023—up to 2.28% from 1.54%. While older 4TB and 6TB hard drives held up relatively well, 8TB and 10TB drives drove the increased failure rates.

“Of course we’d like to see them lower, but the inescapable reality of the cloud storage business is that drives fail,” the report stated. “Over the years, we have seen a wide range of failure rates across different manufacturers, drive models, and drive sizes.”

Backblaze will begin recording new data fields in its drive stats moving forward—such as what vault or pod each drive is located in. Moving forward, the company plans to add other fields like storage server type and data center location. That information could shed light on which drives do well under different sets of environmental conditions, or if certain combinations of drives and hardware (down to its position on a rack) impact the mean time to failure.

For example, Backblaze Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller Andy Klein explained that there could be a difference in the way a specific model of drive performed in Backblaze’s fleet at Nautilus, a data center on a floating barge in California, versus more conventional locations.

“You may need to think about that when you’re going to go out and buy your next set of servers,” Klein told IT Brew.

Backblaze is also experimenting with a handful of new 22 TB drives, their largest yet, though Klein told IT Brew they have not been in service long enough to draw any conclusions beyond a positive first impression.

As drive storage capacity increases, Klein added, there are implicit tradeoffs. For example, rebuild times after a drive fails and has to be replaced are significantly longer, requiring new strategies like using cloning instead of imaging to restore data.

“A 1-terabyte drive, you could do it in less than a day, and a 4-terabyte drive was a couple of days, and 8-terabyte drives start to get to be five or six or seven days,” Klein said. “And the 16 is suddenly measured in weeks.”

“As drives get larger, you have to change the way your operations work in order to make sure your durability space is where it needs to stay,” he added.

While fellow data storage firm Pure Storage has projected the hard disk drive market will effectively be dead by 2028, Klein said Backblaze doesn’t see solid state storage eliminating demand for older hardware. After all, he told IT Brew, magnetic tape is still in widespread use for purposes like data archives.

“We just can’t stop creating data,” Klein said. “As long as it’s economical for drive manufacturers to make drives, they’ll continue to do so.”