Average life of 807 days! 350,000 mechanical hard drives measured: half bad in the first year

Fast technology November 9 news, cloud storage giant Backblaze recently released the latest mechanical hard disk reliability report, revealing a fact that makes hardware enthusiasts uneasy.

Of the large sample of data processing more than 350,000 hard drives, about 1.5% of hard drives fail, and nearly 50% of the damage occurs within the first year of use.

This data from Backblaze is supported by a report from Secure Data Recovery, a data recovery agency. The survey shows that the mechanical unpredictability of mechanical hard drives is extremely strong. Although some hard drives can run smoothly for many years, a considerable part of them will be scrapped due to manufacturing defects in the first week of the factory.

Unexpectedly, about 30% of all damaged hard drives do not have any warning signals before a complete strike, making traditional monitoring software almost futile.

In essence, the cause of hard disk failure is complex and may be due to production defects, such as dislocation of the magnetic head and stuck motor. It can also come from unexpected situations such as voltage surges, drops, or damage at the operating system level inside the hard drive.

Backblaze's monitoring data showed that Seagate had the best mechanical reliability performance in the second quarter of 2026, while Hitachi and Western data also performed well in the long-cycle analysis.

In addition, the data also revealed the correlation between hard drive failure rate and service life: the probability of hard drive failure increased significantly after 7 years of service.

This also means that users who rely on mechanical hard drives for data storage should make plans to replace old hard drives or introduce additional solutions such as cloud storage to supplement them.

However, it is undeniable that mechanical hard drives still have an irreplaceable position in the market environment in 2026. Affected by the surge in demand for high-speed storage in AI data centers, the price of SSDs has continued to rise.

Although SSDs are faster and more durable, mechanical drives still have a huge advantage in terms of cost per unit capacity (cost per GB), and players can assemble a high-reliability raid disk array simply by spending the price of a large-capacity SSD.

Source: MyDrivers (Fast Technology). Content is presented with source attribution. Read the original report.