Backblaze knows storage. The online backup company uses more than 25,000 spinning hard drives at any one time, stuffed into the proprietary Storage Pods it developed and made an open source design. Well, with that many hard drives working away, the company has been able to keep track of failure rates and Backblaze's Brian Beach wrote a wonderful post on the life cycle of hard drives for the company blog.
There are some interesting tidbits in the post. For example, all hard drives exhibit three different failure rates during their lifetimes. Early on there are failures due to infant mortality -- those drives that might have made it through testing but had some fault t
