The resulting list contains 30 models which we’ve sorted by average failure age: To make our table a bit more manageable we’ve limited the list to those drive models which have recorded 50 or more failures. Our Drive Stats dataset contains drive failures for 72 drive models, and that number does not include boot drives. Average Age of Drive Failure by Model and Size This is reasonably close to the two years and 10 months from the Blocks & Files article, but before we confirm their numbers let’s dig into our results a bit more. When we compute the average age at which this cohort of drives failed we get 22,360 hours, which is 932 days, or just over two years and six months. We are left with 17,155 failed drives to analyze. In both of these cases, the drives in question were not in a good state when the data was collected and as such any other data collected could be unreliable. For example, the capacity_bytes field was negative or the model was corrupt, that is unknown or unintelligible. The failed drive had out of bounds data in one or more fields.The failed drive had no data recorded or a zero in the SMART 9 raw attribute.We then removed 95 drives for one of the following reasons: To start the data cleanup process, we first removed 1,355 failed boot drives from the dataset, leaving us with 17,250 data drives. That query produced a list of 18,605 drives which failed between Apand March 30, 2023, inclusive.įor each failed drive we recorded the date, serial_number, model, drive_capacity, failure, and SMART 9 raw value. Given that, our first task was to round up all of the failed drives in our dataset and record the power-on hours for each drive. The article didn’t specify how they collected the amount of time a drive was operational before it failed but we’ll assume they used the SMART 9 raw value for power-on hours. They also determined the current pending sector count for each failed drive, but today we’ll focus on the average age of drive failure. We thought this was an interesting way to look at drive failure, and we wanted to know what we would find if we asked the same question of our Drive Stats data. To summarize, the article found that for the 2,007 failed hard drives analyzed, the average age at which they failed was 1,051 days, or two years and 10 months. The article was based on the work of Timothy Burlee at Secure Data Recovery. Recently the folks at Blocks & Files published an article outlining the average age of a hard drive when it failed. That said, there are outliers out there like our intrepid fleet of 6TB Seagate drives which have an average age of 95.4 months and have a Q1 2023 AFR of 0.92% and a lifetime AFR of 0.89% as we’ll see later in this report. As we’ve seen when we examined hard drive life expectancy using the Bathtub Curve, older drives have a tendency to fail more often. For example, 60% of the 4TB drives are from Seagate and are, on average, 89 months old, and over 95% of the 8TB drives in production are from Seagate and they are, on average, over 70 months old. In our case, many of the older drive models are from Seagate and that helps drive up their overall AFR. This chart combines all of the manufacturer’s drive models regardless of their age. The charts below summarize the Q1 2023 data first by Drive Size and then by manufacturer. Q1 2023 Annualized Failures Rates by Drive Size and Manufacturer We have stockpiles of various sized drives we keep on hand for just this reason. Why? This drive model is replacing some of the 187 failed 8TB drives this quarter. This model has actually been in production since Q1 2022, starting with 18 drives and adding more drives over time. Actually, it is not new, it’s just that we now have 60 drives in production this quarter, so it makes the charts. A new, but not so new drive model: There is one new drive model in Q1 2023, the 8TB Toshiba (model: HDWF180).The 16TB Seagate (model: ST16000NM002J) had zero failures last quarter as well, and the 8TB Seagate (model: ST8000NM000A) has had zero failures since it was first installed in Q3 2022, a lifetime AFR of 0%. That said, for two of the drive models listed, posting zero failures is not new. When reviewing the table, any drive model with less than 50,000 drive days for the quarter does not have enough data to be statistically relevant for that period.
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