SSDs have overtaken hard disk drives (HDDs) when it comes to performance, but many people still turn to spinning platters, whether they’re building network-attached storage (NAS) or have large capacity needs on a budget. depends. However, older drives that have seen a lot of use may not be as reliable as they used to be. Data Backblaze shared this week highlights how hard drive average failure rate (AFR) increases over time.
Since 2013, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company, has published an annual report analyzing the AFR of hard drives in data centers. The 2022 report, shared on Tuesday, examines 230,921 hard drives across 29 models from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba and WDC, with capacities ranging from 4 TB to 16 TB. All models included at least 60 drives that had not previously been used in testing.
Note that the sample group consists only of drives that Backblaze had on hand. These drives are of varying ages and some have been in use longer than others. Backblaze’s report, however, offers a unique take on the consequences of long-term hard drive use.
In case you need a reminder of the morbid nature of time, Backblaze’s report provides evidence that hard drive AFR increases with age. This isn’t surprising news, but Backblaze has provided data to paint a picture of what it might look like.
According to Backblaze’s analysis of the findings, the chart below “shows that older drives fail more often when grouped by size.”
Note that the 6 TB and 10 TB samples only contain one drive model each, while the remaining samples contain at least four drive models.
Backblaze pointed out that the increase in AFR with HDD aging degrades along the bathtub curve. This curve tends to have high failure at release before dropping, stabilizing, and increasing as the product ages. According to Backblaze, the hard drive average failure rate was 1.01% in 2021 and 1.37% in 2022.
“Aging hard drives seem to be the most logical reason for an increase in AFR in 2022. We can dig deeper, but it’s probably a moot point at this point,” says Backblaze’s blog.
The oldest (92.5 months average age) hard drive Backblaze tested was a 6 TB Seagate (ST6000DX000). Its AFR was 0.11% in 2021 and 0.68% in 2022. Backblaze said this was “a very respectable number at any time, but especially after he’s been nearly eight years.”
Seagate, followed by Toshiba, topped Backblaze’s AFR grouping chart by vendor, but most Seagate drives are much older than the rest of the drives tested.
“Generally, Seagate drives are cheaper and typically have higher failure rates in our environment,” says Backblaze. “But typically their failure rate is not so high that they are not cost-effective over their lifetime. To us, many Seagate drive models are just as cost-effective as their more expensive drives. ”
