New information illustrates time’s impact on onerous drive failure charges

SSDs have usurped onerous disk drives (HDDs) with regards to efficiency, however whether or not constructing a network-attached storage (NAS) or having high-capacity wants on a funds, loads of individuals nonetheless depend on spinning platters. Older drives which have seen numerous use, nonetheless, is probably not as dependable as earlier than. Knowledge Backblaze shared this week highlights how a tough drive’s common failure fee (AFR) can improve with age.

Since 2013, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage firm, has printed an annual report analyzing the AFRs of onerous drives in its information heart. The 2022 report shared on Tuesday examines 230,921 onerous drives throughout 29 fashions from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and WDC, with capacities starting from 4–16TB. All fashions included a minimum of 60 drives that weren’t beforehand used for testing.

Understand that the pattern group solely consists of drives that Backblaze had readily available, and they’re of various ages, with some used for extra days than others. Nevertheless, Backblaze’s report does give us a novel look into the outcomes of long-term onerous drive use.

In case you wanted a reminder of the morbid nature of time, Backblaze’s report exhibits proof of onerous drives’ AFR growing with age. That is not shocking information, however Backblaze is offering the information to color an image of what that appears like.

Backblaze’s evaluation of its findings stated that the graph under “exhibits that the older drives, when grouped by measurement, fail extra typically.”

Backblaze famous that a rise in AFR as an HDD ages falls according to the bath curve, the place failures are typically increased upon launch earlier than dropping, stabilizing, after which growing because the product ages. Backblaze stated that the common failure fee of its onerous drives was 1.01 p.c in 2021 and 1.37 p.c in 2022.

“The growing older of our fleet of onerous drives does seem like probably the most logical purpose for the elevated AFR in 2022. We might dig in additional, however that’s in all probability moot at this level,” Backblaze’s weblog stated.

The oldest (common age of 92.5 months) onerous drive Backblaze examined was a 6TB Seagate (ST6000DX000). Its AFR was 0.11 p.c in 2021 and 0.68 p.c in 2022. Backblaze stated this was “a really respectable quantity any time, however particularly after practically eight years.”

Seagate, adopted by Toshiba, topped Backblaze’s chart grouping AFRs by vendor, however many of the Seagate drives are a lot older than the remainder of the drives examined.

“Typically, Seagate drives are inexpensive and their failure charges are usually increased in our surroundings,” Backblaze stated. “However, their failure charges are usually not excessive sufficient to make them much less cost-effective over their lifetime. You might make an excellent case that for us, many Seagate drive fashions are simply as cost-effective as costlier drives.”