Helium-filled hard drives are now all the rage. But how does their reliability stack up compared to regular air-filled hard drives? What better company to answer this question than cloud storage specialists Backblaze[1].
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Why is Backblaze the perfect company to answer this question? Because it has a lot fo helium- and air-filled hard drives in service.
A lot.
In the 8- to 12-terabytes storage capacity range the company has 19,065 helium-filled drives in service, along with a further 24,281 air-filled units. Having this many drives in operation allows Backblaze to do some number-crunching and calculate the Annualized Failure Rate [3] (AFR) for the drives.
Bottom line - there's very little difference in AFR between helium-filled hard drives and their air-filled counterparts.
Helium- vs air-filled hard drive failure rates Backblaze[4]
So does this mean that their failure rate is the same? Andy Klein, Director of Product Marketing at Backblaze, thinks not, and that helium-filled drives will prove to be more reliable if we take into account usage:
My hypothesis is that after normalizing the data so that the helium and air-filled drives have the same (or similar) usage (Drive Days), the helium-filled drives we use will continue to have a lower Annualized Failure Rate versus the air-filled drives we use.
Another question people wonder about helium-filled hard drives is whether the gas escapes out of the drive? By using the SMART 22[5] data point, which records the status of helium inside of a hard drive, the