If your hard drive is dying, this could be why
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New data from cloud backup and storage management firm Backblaze seems to verify that the age of a hard disk drive (HDD) increases the chance of it failing.
A report published in a after (opens in new tab) on the Backblaze blog (via The register (opens in new tab)) states that the age of a disc has been considered an important factor in predicting failure associated with, according to Backblaze’s “cloud storage evangelist” Andy Klein, Backblaze’s aging portfolio of drivers.
According to statistics for 230,921 of its drives verified to be used for storage purposes, smaller drives (from 4-10 TB) failed more often than larger ones (12-16 TB), but they were also older.
Trends in HDD failures
Backblaze’s data superficially shows that Seagate’s and Toshiba’s smallest drives in their portfolios are the most prone to failure, with both vendor’s products accounting for 3.64% of all the company’s drive failures in the third quarter of 2022.
Klein, however, praised the “very respectable” annualized failure rates (AFRs) of these vendors’ longest-established drives (some after nearly eight years in service), then called Seagate drives particularly suited for enterprise deployment.
“In general, Seagate drives are cheaper and cheaper […] their failure rates are typically not high enough to make them less cost-effective over their lifetime.”
Klein believes Backblaze will replace the smaller drives with larger ones by 2023. Until now, there has been no inherent relationship between a drive’s size and how susceptible it is to failure, and in fact only the 16 TB drives saw a net decrease in AFR of 0.07%.
As a result, we may have to wait for Backblaze to move more and more to larger drives as part of its fleet before any evidence of that sort of correlation surfaces.
According to Backblaze, it is hard disk fault information (opens in new tab) supports the bathtub curvature (opens in new tab)where a product has higher failure rates at the beginning of its life cycle, which equalize and rise again in the course of its life.
However, it has noticed improvements across the board in hard drive manufacturing. In a 2021 report on the curve, the company claims that many manufacturers, such as Seagate, are looking at extensive testing of their HDDs before shipping (opens in new tab)reducing the risk of early failure.
It also noted that many rides tend to last longer and fail much more often in their fifth or sixth year than their third or fourth year, as was the case in Backblaze’s previous report on the curve in 2013.