The study found that smaller capacity hard drives are more likely to fail with age

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Briefly: A research report on hard drive failure rates for 2022 confirms that drive age is a key predictor of potential failure. The report examined 230,921 hard drives, and only the 8TB Seagate (Model: ST8000NM000A) had no failures.

A quick peek at the latest Report From the cloud storage provider, Backblaze has concluded that the larger drives—12TB, 14TB, and 16TB—fail less frequently than smaller-capacity versions. Over the past year, the annual failure rate for hard drives has increased dramatically from 1.01 percent in 2021 to 1.37 percent in 2022, according to Andy Klein, chief cloud storage evangelist at Backblaze.

The cloud backup company had 236,608 hard disk drives (HDDs) in use at the end of 2022, including 4,299 boot drives and 235,608 data drives. Backclaze excluded boot units and 388 data hard drives from the analysis because they were either used for testing or had a fleet size of less than 60 units. This left a total of 230,921 hard drives considered.

“In our quarterly Drive Statistics reports for the second quarter of 2022 and the third quarter of 2022, we noted an increase in the overall AFR from the previous quarter and attributed it to the aging of the drive fleet, but is this the case?” Klein asked.

The answer seems to be yes.

Klein noted that every size (excluding 16TB drives) showed an increase in AFR between 2021 and 2022 when the highest capacity hard drives — 12TB, 14TB and 16TB — were compared with the smaller sizes — 4TB, 6TB and 8TB. terabyte and 10 terabyte. The AFR for small drives was 2.12%, much higher than the 1.37% increase for all hard drives in 2022. In addition, although smaller units accounted for only 28.7% of drive days in 2022, they were responsible for 44.5% of drive failures.

However, Klein notes that although mini drives failed more frequently last year, they are also older. The oldest hard drive examined, a 6TB Seagate (ST6000DX000), has an average age of 92.5 months. The AFR in 2021 was 0.11 percent, while in 2022, it was 0.68 percent.

A Backblaze table that ranks AFRs by vendor showed Seagate and Toshiba to have the highest failure rate. However, most of the Seagate units were much older than the other hard drives examined. The company expects to replace the older drives with 16TB and larger hard drives in 2023, which means 4TB drives and Seagate 6TB drives may be on their way out.

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