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Report: Most HDDs Die After Almost 3 Years, Newer Models Are Less Reliable

The study found that drives made before 2015 were more reliable than newer drives.
By Josh Norem
Hard Drive Platter
Credit: Patrick Lindenberg on Unsplash

For the past few years, we've mostly seen reports from the cloud storage and backup company Backblaze about hard drive reliability. Its blog posts indicate which manufacturers sell the most reliable products over time. Notably, those studies examine working drives alongside ones that have failed.

Now, a data recovery company has conducted a study only on failed drives it received from customers. This has allowed it to understand better how long a drive will function. The study shows the average time for a drive to fail is just shy of three years. This doesn't mean most HDDs will fail in this timeframe. Instead, it means that if a drive is going to die, it has a good chance it'll happen within this time frame.

The study was conducted by a data recovery company in Los Angeles named Secure Data Recovery (via Blocks & Files). Unlike Backblaze, which has hundreds of thousands of drives spinning in its pods, this study looked at just 2,007 failed hard drives. The study's crux was examining two statistics, which it counts as "predictable." These are how long drives were powered on and how many bad sectors they accumulated, as opposed to unpredictable events like natural disasters, malware, and mishandling drives. The study's overarching goal was to give folks a rough idea of what they could expect for a drive's lifetime to convince them always to back up their data.

Power-on Hours for the drives examined
This graph shows how many hours the drives were alive from each manufacturer. Credit: Secure Data Recovery

The study looked at drives from six manufacturers. The lion's share was from Western Digital, at 57% total. That includes 47% from WD and 10% from Hitachi, which it owns. The rest included 28% from Seagate, 8% from Toshiba, and 6% from Samsung. There was also 1% from Maxtor, so those must have been ancient drives. Drive capacity ranged from 40GB (Maxtor?) to 10TB; all drives were received in 2022.

Based on their analysis, the average time a failed drive was powered on comes to 25,233 hours. That's 1,051 days, or two years and 10 months. In that time frame, the average number of bad sectors on the drives equaled 1,548. That sounds like a lot, but the company points out that a 1TB drive has almost 2 billion of them. Still, they found that the rate of bad sector development will typically increase once it starts, making data corruption a real possibility.

Reallocated sectors
The number of reallocated sectors on the failed drives. Credit: Secure Data Recovery

The most surprising finding is that drives made before 2015 were more reliable than newer models. They point to technological advancements that intrinsically make drive internals more complex, resulting in a higher likelihood of failure. The study bluntly states that conventional magnetic recording (CMR) drives are more reliable than newer shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives, which have overlapping tracks. SMR drives also offer worse benchmark performance than CMR drives and have recently been a hotbed of controversy.

The results of this study notably fly in the face of Backblaze's most recent report on hard drive failure rates. Backblaze has historically shown Hitachi to be one of the most reliable brands, but this study shows the opposite. However, both companies' examinations also show that drives tend to become more unreliable over time, but that can vary widely according to specific models. Both companies also plainly state that everyone needs a backup plan for critical data.

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