Backblaze is a backup and cloud storage firm that has been monitoring the annualized failure charges (AFRs) of the onerous drives in its datacenter since 2013. As you'll be able to think about, that's netted the agency a number of knowledge. And that knowledge has led the corporate to conclude that HDDs “are lasting longer” and displaying fewer errors.
That conclusion got here from a blog post this week by Stephanie Doyle, Backblaze's author and weblog operations specialist, and Pat Patterson, Backblaze's chief technical evangelist. The authors in contrast the AFRs for the roughly 317,230 drives in Backblaze's datacenter to the AFRs the corporate recorded when analyzing the 21,195 drives it had in 2013 and 206,928 drives in 2021. Doyle and Patterson stated they recognized “a fairly stable deviation in each age of drive failure and the excessive level of AFR from the final two instances we've run the analyses.”
As Doyle and Patterson wrote, the examined drives' excessive failure share peaks this yr had been 4.25 % at 10 years and three months, in comparison with 13.73 % at about three years and three months in 2013 and 14.24 % at seven years and 9 months in 2021.
“Not solely is {that a} important enchancment in drive longevity, it's additionally the primary time we've seen the height drive failure fee on the bushy finish of the drive curve. And, it's a few third of every of the opposite failure peaks,” Doyle and Patterson wrote.
You may try Paterson and Doyle's August blog post for extra details about the drives they analyzed this yr. The drives had been from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and WDC, and so they had a median age of three.7 months to 103.9 months (about 8.7 years). The drives ranged from 4TB to 24TB. In 2021, Backblaze's pattern had drives from the identical distributors, and the drives examined for every mannequin had a median age of three.57 to 80.85 months (about 6.7 years). The drives ranged from 4TB to 16TB.
As Backblaze has finished previously, Doyle and Paterson in contrast the behaviors of Backblaze's datacenter HDDs with the bath curve, an engineering precept that claims element failure charges are likely to observe a U-shape over time, with extra failures occurring early in life earlier than the speed drops, settles, after which picks up once more because the element ages.
