SSDs have overtaken hard drives (HDDs) when it comes to performance, but despite creating network-attached storage (NAS) and having a huge impact on the budget, many people still rely on directly to the rotating plates. Older drives have seen a lot of use, however, they may not be as reliable as they used to be. Data Backblaze released this week shows how the average failure rate (AFR) of hard drives increases with age.
Since 2013, Backblaze, a storage and cloud storage company, has published an annual report analyzing the AFRs of hard drives in its data center. The 2022 report shared Tuesday examines 230,921 hard drives across 29 models from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and WDC, with capacities ranging from 4–16TB. All samples included 60 previously unused drives for testing.
Keep in mind that the sample group is the only drives that Backblaze has, they are of different ages and have been used for several days for others. However, Backblaze’s report gives us a unique look at the consequences of long-term hard drive usage.
If you need a reminder of how bad it is over time, Backblaze’s report shows signs of hard drive AFR increasing with age. That’s not surprising news, but Backblaze is providing data to paint a picture of the situation.
Backblaze’s analysis of its findings said the graph below “shows that older drives, when grouped by size, fail more often.”
Note that the 6TB and 10TB models only include one hard drive each, while the rest have more than four.
Backblaze stated that the increase in AFR as the HDD ages falls on the edge of the swimming curve, and the failures increase in the release before decreasing, stabilizing, and increasing with age. of the product. Backblaze said the failure rate of its hard drives will be 1.01 percent in 2021 and 1.37 percent in 2022.
“The aging of our hard drive vehicles seems to be the main reason for the increase in AFR in 2022. We can dig further, but it may be a problem at this point,” the blog said. Backblaze.
The oldest (92.5 months old) hard drive Backblaze tested was a 6TB Seagate (ST6000DX000). Its AFR is 0.11 percent in 2021 and 0.68 percent in 2022. Backblaze said it is “a very respectable number at any time, but after almost eight years.”
Seagate, followed by Toshiba, topped Backblaze’s chart that categorizes AFRs by vendor, but most of the Seagate drives were older than the other drives tested.
“In general, Seagate drives are cheaper and have higher failure rates than our environment,” Backblaze said. “However, their rates are usually not high enough to make them less expensive over their lifetime. You can make a good case for us, there are many Seagate drive models that are the same pay to more expensive drives.”
