"Running such a large number of drives, they’ve learned a few things. High infant mortality. They’ve taken to burning in new pods for several days before putting them into service due to infant mortality and the relative difficulty of replacing drives in the middle of the box. 5% annual failure rate. That’s across all drives, young and old, of their population of over 9,000 drives. And in 4 years they haven’t seen any drives die of old age. Hitachi’s HDS5C3030ALA630 drives have a sub-1% failure rate. The latest and greatest from Hitachi has worked for Backblaze. All parts come with a 3 year warranty. That means that other than labor, your maintenance is free for 3 years. Compare that to your BigCo service contract. Heat doesn’t correlate with drive failure. Some drives run hotter than others, but Backblaze hasn’t seen any increased failure rates because of it. That finding agrees with earlier research." - × × ×