Cloud backup and storage supplier Backblaze launched its newest annual report dissecting hard-drive failure charges, and it’s clear that age is a key determinant of a drive’s potential for failure.
Backblaze has turn out to be one thing of a go-to supply for hard-drive sturdiness, because of its quarterly evaluation of its personal fleet, which included 231,309 laborious drives used to retailer knowledge as of December 31. (After excluding drives used for testing functions and low-count fashions, Backblaze analyzed 230,921 gadgets for its report.)
Total, Backblaze has discovered the storage drives it operates to be fairly sturdy. The oldest drives in its fleet are the 6TB Seagate and 4TB Toshiba, with a median age of 92.5 months and 91.3 months, respectively. That’s eight years of close to fixed use, which is a testomony to the distributors’ drive development.
From 2021 to 2022, there was a notable improve within the annualized failure charge (AFR) throughout all of Backblaze’s drives, rising from 1.01% in 2021 to 1.37% in 2022. It seems to be a case of ageing drives lastly breaking, in response to a weblog by Andy Klein, principal cloud storage evangelist for Backblaze.
Klein in contrast year-over-year failure charges for various dimension drives and located that each dimension apart from 16TB drives confirmed a rise in AFR from 2021 to 2022.
There was fairly a gulf between the smaller drives (starting from 4TB to 10TB) and the bigger drives (12TB to 16TB). The smaller drives had an AFR of 0.85%, whereas the bigger drives had an AFR of simply 0.20%.
Seagate had the best failure charge, however Klein famous that the majority of these fashions are a lot older than the remainder. Klein additionally shared that Seagate drives are cheaper than their opponents, and their failure charge isn’t that a lot increased, making them price efficient.
“Normally, Seagate drives are cheaper, and their failure charges are usually increased in our surroundings. Their failure charges are usually not excessive sufficient to make them much less price efficient over their lifetime. You may make an excellent case that, for us, many Seagate drive fashions are simply as price efficient as dearer drives,” Klein mentioned.
In 2022, just one hard-drive mannequin in Backblaze’s fleet had zero failures: the 8TB Seagate. Nevertheless, Backblaze solely has 79 of this mannequin in service, and these drives are used as spares to switch 8TB drives which have failed, Klein famous.
Western Digital earns bragging rights for the bottom failure charge at simply 0.20%. The subsequent closest is HGST, which Western Digital owns, at 0.81% AFR.
Klein mentioned that in 2023, Backblaze plans to switch older drives with 16TB and bigger laborious drives. Which means it could actually deploy way more capability in the identical house, and the eight-year-old Seagates are headed for recycling.
One thing else to contemplate – though it wasn’t introduced up within the Backblaze report – is that new high-capacity drives are crammed with helium to scale back the friction from so many platters spinning within the tight house. The helium is assumed to additionally improve lifespan by lowering mentioned friction. After all, we received’t know for one more 6 to eight years if that’s true.
The complete Backblaze report is accessible right here.
Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.
