If your mission-critical device has a 2.5-year-old spinning disk hard drive, the clock may be ticking.
In a study of over 17,000 defective hard drives, cloud storage and backup company Backblaze found that the average age at which they failed was two years and six months. The age and rate of failure varied by device and use.
Although the rate of hard drive failure is relatively low (1.54% per year), one of the potentially troubling takeaways from the report is that a computer with a defective drive wouldn’t necessarily manifest until being in use for a few years. This means that a well-established and seemingly reliable machine being used for mission-critical tasks has the potential to fail when it’s least expected.
The potential for hardware failure highlights the importance for backup services (including Nodal’s Backblaze Backup for Workstations and Servers offering) and remote storage, especially via following the 3-2-1 rule of backups, where you keep at least three copies of your data using two types of storage media and one copy offsite. Any files or information stored on a single drive run the risk of being irrevocably lost in the case of a failure, which can be either inconvenient or catastrophic to a business’s operations. Data recovery for failed drives, such as Drivesavers which has an excellent success rate, may be able to save your data when your IT teams can’t. But these services can be cost prohibitive and the time it takes to get your data back could leave you unable to work for days or even weeks.
Not sure if your files are secure and your hard drives are reliable? Nodal can help through our partnership with Backblaze. Contact us today to see if you qualify for a discounted rate!