A data recovery firm that analyzed 2,007 damaged or defective hard disk drives (HDDs) concluded that “in general, older drives appear to be more durable and resilient than newer ones.” I was.
The statement comes from Secure Data Recovery, a Los Angeles-based HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery company that has been in business since 2007 and claims to have resolved over 100,000 cases. The company investigated the HDD he received in 2022. According to his Secure Data Recovery blog post spotted by Blocks & Files on Thursday, “most” of those drives ranged from his 40GB to his 10TB.
In a March 8 post on Secure Data Recovery, the HDDs received were tested by engineers for “power-on hours,” the total time the drive has been functioning (i.e., the device has been in Secure since the owner began using the drive). up to the point of arrival). data recovery.
The company also determined the drive’s current pending sector count, which indicates “the number of damaged or unusable sectors that the hard drive has developed during normal read and write operations.” The company said its data did not include his hard drive enduring unpredictable failures or damage from unforeseen events such as electrical surges, malware, natural disasters and “accidental mishandling.” ing.
Of the sample, 936 drives are Western Digital, 559 are Seagate, 211 are Hitachi brand, 151 are Toshiba, 123 are Samsung, and 27 are Maxtor drives. Notably, 74.5% of HDDs are from either Western Digital or Seagate, and Secure Data Recovery predicts 80% of hard drive shipments in 2021, citing data from the Digital Storage Technology Newsletter shared by Forbes. It says it occupies
The average time to failure within the sample size was 2 years and 10 months, and the 2,007 defective HDDs contained an average of 1,548 bad sectors.
“1,548 bad sectors out of hundreds of millions or billions of disk fragments may seem negligible, but development speeds often increase and the risk of data corruption doubles,” the blog states. increase.
Secure Data Recovery isn’t the only company looking for storage insights with their business. As Blocks & Files pointed out, backup and cloud storage company Backblaze is using hard drives that exceed the life expectancy of HDDs sent by clients last year. As of the end of 2022, Backblaze’s 230,921 hard drives have an average age of 3.6, compared to his 2 years, 10 months average time to drive failure that Secure Data Recovery addressed last year. It was the year Clearly, Backblaze has a much larger sample size. Additionally, the analysis is much more detailed, breaking down HDD failure rate trends by model. This discrepancy demonstrates the difficulty of pinpointing when an HDD is likely to fail, and the importance of data backup.
Are older drives more durable?
If you feel that HDDs aren’t built to last as long as they used to, you’re not alone. The Secure Data Recovery blog suggested a relationship between when HDDs were manufactured and how long before they failed.
We found that the top five most durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were manufactured before 2015. Meanwhile, most of the least durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were manufactured after 2015.
Unfortunately, Secure Data Recovery didn’t specify what “most” means. However, it has been pointed out that HDD manufacturers are pushing the performance envelope as the reason why HDD reliability may be declining in modern products. This includes size limits that cut “allowance between moving parts that would affect mechanical damage and wear resistance.”
Secure Data Recovery also slammed SMR, a three-letter acronym that has become almost a four-letter word for storage users in 2020. The revelation that various brands such as Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba were secretly selling devices with shingle magnetic recording disks instead of CMR (conventional magnetic recording) disks shocked consumers. Western Digital ended up paying $2.7 million in a class action lawsuit. .
Users were primarily upset that drives utilizing SMR offered slower random write speeds than drives using CMR, but Secure Data Recovery found that disks “put more stress” on components. I also believe that SMR affects HDD reliability because it puts it down.
