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Overall, the average AFR was 1.4 percent. The drive with the lowest AFR (0.28 percent) and at least 2.2 million drive days is Western Digital Corporation (WDC)'s 16TB WUH721816ALE6L4 (Backblaze has 14,098 units). The model with the highest AFR (2.57 percent) and at least 2.2 million drive days is Seagate's 4TB ST4A000DMO00 (Backblaze had 18,070 units). It's worth noting, though, that the model has the largest number of drive days out of any model on Backblaze's table. In February, Backblaze said Seagate HDDs generally show higher failure rates in Backblaze's environment and are also "less expensive," so "their failure rates are typically not high enough to make them less cost-effective over their lifetime. You could make a good case that for us, many Seagate drive models are just as cost- effective as more expensive drives."

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Overall, the average AFR was 1.4 percent. The drive with the lowest AFR (0.28 percent) and at least 2.2 million drive days is Western Digital Corporation (WDC)'s 16TB WUH721816ALE6L4 (Backblaze has 14,098 units). The model with the highest AFR (2.57 percent) and at least 2.2 million drive days is Seagate's 4TB ST4A000DMO00 (Backblaze had 18,070 units). It's worth noting, though, that the model has the largest number of drive days out of any model on Backblaze's table. In February, Backblaze said Seagate HDDs generally show higher failure rates in Backblaze's environment and are also "less expensive," so "their failure rates are typically not high enough to make them less cost-effective over their lifetime. You could make a good case that for us, many Seagate drive models are just as cost- effective as more expensive drives."
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Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Friday, 05-May-2023 09:07:13 JST Carl T. Bergstrom
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@waldok @arstechnica
This does not mean that your drive will fail at 2.5 years on average.
In fact, something closer to the data we need are buried deeper in the article: the annualized failure rate data. The average annualized failure rate is 1.4%.
We don't know the distribution of failure times, but for comparison, if the risk of failure was constant over time and thus the lifetime of a hard drive was exponentially distributed, this would correspond to an average lifetime of 70 years.

In conversation Friday, 05-May-2023 09:07:13 JST from fediscience.org permalink