Simply Statistics A statistics blog by Rafa Irizarry, Roger Peng, and Jeff Leek

Survival analysis for hard drives

How long do hard drives last?

Backblaze has kept up to 25,000 hard drives constantly online for the last four years. Every time a drive fails, they note it down, then slot in a replacement. After four years, Backblaze now has some amazing data and graphs that detail the failure rate of hard drives over the first four years of their life.

I guess it’s easier to do this with hard drives than it is for people.