Report: HDDs are becoming less reliable is this the price to pay for cheaper and higher-capacity storage?

Date:
Wed, 14 Feb 2024 14:45:42 +0000

Description:
Hard disk drives are failing more than before, but is it a reliability issue or are variables to blame for fluctuating figures?

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The latest findings by cloud storage company Backblaze, which analyzed the annualized failure rates of more than 270,000 hard drives in 2023, HDDs are becoming less reliable overall.

The extensive report, which covers 35 different hard drive models running for a combined total of nearly 90 million days in 2023, found that the annualized failure rate had climbed to 1.70%.

This is a noticeable jump up from the 2022 rate of 1.37%, and the 2021 rate
of 1.01%, marking HDDs as less reliable counterparts to SSD s. Hard drives
are failing more frequently

The report, which is one of the biggest-scale representations of storage device performance globally, revealed widespread failures, with only one of the 35 models returning a 0% failure rate. On the other end of the scale,
some of the drives watched by the company reported alarmingly high failure rates of around 10-15%.

Although the figures spell out an uncertain future for the hard disk drive, theyre testament to Backblazes commitment to providing a reliable cloud service the company claims to have replaced an HDD every two hours and five minutes throughout 2023, on average.

HDD development has brought the cost down while simultaneously pushing
storage capacity up, so while they have started to show their flaws, HDDs still have their place. For example, Backblazes largest HDDs 22TB WDC models offer immense storage capabilities.

While the failure rates suggest a troubling future for HDD sellers worldwide, Backblaze notes a limitation of the study in 2023, around one-fifth of the companys fleet was made up of aging drives (six years old, or more).

However, there are some interesting insights to be drawn from the study; 10TB hard drives, for example, fail at least twice as much as any other capacity
in the companys fleet.

Backblaze is yet to announce its 2023 statistics for SSD models, but in 2022, the annualized failure rate stood at 0.98%, reasonably on par with the 1.05% rate recorded in 2021, however there are fewer SSDs being tracked and theyre generally slightly newer, rendering a comparison between SSD and HDD models unreliable for now. More from TechRadar Pro After an upgrade? Here are the best HDD options for your PC Check out our roundup of the best business laptops If your hard drive is dying, this could be why



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/are-increasing-hdd-failure-rates-a-valid-tradeof f-for-cheaper-and-higher-capacity-storage


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