As of March 31, 2021, Backblaze had 175,443 drives spread across four data centers on two continents. Of that number, there were 3,187 boot drives and 172,256 data drives. The boot drives consisted of 1,669 hard drives and 1,518 SSDs. This report will review the quarterly and lifetime failure rates for our data drives, and we’ll compare the failure rates of our HDD and SSD boot drives. Along the way, we’ll share our observations and insights of the data presented, and as always we look forward to your comments below.
At the end of March 2021, Backblaze was monitoring 172,256 hard drives used to store data. For our evaluation, we removed from consideration 337 drives which were used for either testing purposes or were drive models for which we did not have at least 60 drives. This leaves us with 171,919 hard drives for the Q1 2021 quarterly report, as shown below.