New data illustrates time’s effect on hard drive failure rates

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Backblaze examines 230,921 HDDs across 29 models from Seagate, Toshiba, and more.

“In general, Seagate drives are less expensive and their failure rates are typically higher in our environment,” Backblaze said. “But, 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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AFR as used in article — Average Failure Rate

AFR — Annualized Failure Rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annualized_failure_rate

Is Average Failure Rate equivalent to Annualized Failure Rate?

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geekdom wrote:

Is Average Failure Rate equivalent to Annualized Failure Rate?

Not at all.  If you read the article, AFR increases as drives get older, and AFR is not predictive, it is historical, gleaned from failed drives and their actual age.  Failure rate increases as drives get older.  Annualized Failure Rate is calculated and predictive for a class, but not for any individual unit.

It’s typical in a redundant-level RAID array to run drives to failure and then hot swap a fresh drive in its place.  I’ve done that with my own NAS RAID 10 array, then preemptively upgraded the rest of the drives one at a time so that the array can rebuild without interruption, and hopefully my next failure is a few more years away.

Create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates, in case you need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do. We don't all have to do the same things.

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