Back it up: Most hard drives that fail do so within 3 years

Your storage isn't inherently destined to die young, though

- ALAINA YEE

Follow any tech site with regularity and you'll hear the same refrain over and over-back up your files. The longer you wait, the more you flirt with disaster, and you don't have as much time as you might think. In March, a Los Angeles storage recovery service revealed that on average, their clients' failed hard drives died within the first three years of use (fave.co/4551Vvj). And now a study from Backblaze has corroborated that finding with much more data.

In the original report, Secure Data Recovery came to its discovery by cataloging the details (fave.co/457cwnh) of 2,007 faulty drives from six prominent manufacturers, with capacities ranging from 40GB to 10TB. Backblaze’s latest release of drive statistics (which the cloud storage and backup service publishes quarterly about the storage powering its data centers) paints a similar picture.

BACKBLAZE AVERAGE AGE OF DRIVE FAILURE BY MODEL