If your hard drive is dying, this could be why

Date:
Wed, 01 Feb 2023 13:42:16 +0000

Description:
Hard drives are failing more per year, and experts think theres one good reason for it.

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New data from cloud backup and storage management firm Backblaze appears to verify that the age of a hard disk drive (HDD) increases the likelihood of it failing.

A report published in a post on the Backblaze blog (via The Register ) states that the age of a drive was deemed an important factor in predicting failure in correlation with, according to Backblazes cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein, Backblazes aging portfolio of drives.

According to statistics for 230,921 of its drives verified as used for
storage purposes, smaller drives (from 4-10TB) failed more often than larger ones (12-16TB), but they were also older. HDD failure trends

The Backblaze data superficially shows that the smallest Seagate and Toshiba drives in its portfolio are the most prone to failure, with both vendors products accounting for 3.64% of all of the companys drive failures in Q3 2022.

However, Klein did praise the very respectable annualized failure rates
(AFRs) of its longest standing drives from these vendors (some after almost eight years in service), and went on to cite Seagate drives in particular as suitable for business deployment.

"In general, Seagate drives are less expensive and [...] their failure rates are typically not high enough to make them less cost effective over their lifetime.

Klein believes that, for Backblaze, 2023 will involve replacing its smaller drives with larger ones. So far, theres no inherent link between the size of
a drive and how prone it is to failure, and, in fact, only its 16TB drives
saw net decreases in AFR of 0.07%.

As a result, we may have to wait for Backblaze to shift more and more towards larger drives as part of its fleet before any evidence of that sort of correlation begins to surface.

According to Backblaze, its hard drive failure data supports the bathtub
curve , whereby a product sees higher rates of failure early in its life cycle, which level out over the course of its life, and increasing again.
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However, it has noticed improvements in HDD manufacturing across the board.
In a report on the curve from 2021, the company claims that many manufacturers, such as Seagate, have moved to extensive testing of their HDDs before shipping , decreasing the likelihood of early failures.

It also observed that many drives tend to last longer, failing in their fifth or sixth year far more often than the third or fourth year, as was the case
in Backblazes previous report on the curve in 2013. Here's our list of the best solid state drives (SSDs) right now



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/if-your-hard-drive-is-dying-this-could-be-why


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