Last year, IPVM released the surveillance industry's first survey results on hard drive failure / duration, showing a consensus around 3 to 4 year average life span. Now, new statistics from a cloud storage provider show their projected average to ~6 years.
Let's review key details and differences:
- The storage provider has deployed 25,000 drives over the last 5 years. They say these are 'consumer-grade' drives but do not cite specific make/models. The drives are obviously deployed in climate controlled data centers.
- They found that 80% make it through 4 years, as shown by this chart:
Breaking it down by time, they found:
- For the first 1.5 years, drives fail at 5.1% per year.
- For the next 1.5 years, drives fail LESS, at about 1.4% per year.
- After 3 years though, failures rates skyrocket to 11.8% per year.
Their Stats Vs Security Integrator Survey Results
We are not surprised that this cloud storage provider is finding longer average storage duration than what security integrators are reporting. The primary, but major difference, is where hard drives are frequently being deployed in surveillance systems - often in non climate controlled, poorly ventilated areas, such as recorders used as foot stools in guard shacks...
Related hard drive posts: How to Handle Hard Drive Failures, How Costly are Hard Drive Failures? and Favorite Hard Drives for Surveillance.