If you're prepared for a hard drive failure, you can keep your data safe. By David Nield. Published Aug 28, 2024 10:01 AM EDT Your hard drive isn't going to keep going forever.

Backblaze is a pure storage provider; cloud storage is all they do, and they dig deep into the statistics of hard drive failure and share their data with the industry.

However, Klein notes that although smaller drives failed more frequently last year, they are also older. The oldest hard disc examined, a 6TB Seagate (ST6000DX000), had an average age of 92.5 months.

The yearly failure rate for hard drives has risen in the past three years, reaching 1.37% in 2022. This increase is due to the age of the drives, as all hardware becomes more likely to fail over time.