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Backblaze log in5/21/2023 The helium is thought to also increase lifespan by reducing said friction. Something else to consider – although it wasn't brought up in the Backblaze report – is that new high-capacity drives are filled with helium to reduce the friction from so many platters spinning in the tight space. That means it can deploy much more capacity in the same space, and the eight-year-old Seagates are headed for recycling. Klein said that in 2023, Backblaze plans to replace older drives with 16TB and larger hard drives. The next closest is HGST, which Western Digital owns, at 0.81% AFR. Western Digital earns bragging rights for the lowest failure rate at just 0.20%. However, Backblaze only has 79 of this model in service, and these drives are used as spares to replace 8TB drives that have failed, Klein noted. In 2022, only one hard-drive model in Backblaze's fleet had zero failures: the 8TB Seagate. You could make a good case that, for us, many Seagate drive models are just as cost effective as more expensive drives," Klein said. Their failure rates are typically not high enough to make them less cost effective over their lifetime. "In general, Seagate drives are less expensive, and their failure rates are typically higher in our environment. Klein also shared that Seagate drives are cheaper than their competitors, and their failure rate is not that much higher, making them cost effective. Seagate had the highest failure rate, but Klein noted that most of those models are much older than the rest. There was quite a gulf between the smaller drives (ranging from 4TB to 10TB) and the larger drives (12TB to 16TB). The smaller drives had an AFR of 0.85%, while the larger drives had an AFR of just 0.20%. Klein compared year-over-year failure rates for different size drives and found that every size except for 16TB drives showed an increase in AFR from 2021 to 2022. It appears to be a case of aging drives finally breaking, according to a blog by Andy Klein, principal cloud storage evangelist for Backblaze. From 2021 to 2022, there was a notable increase in the annualized failure rate (AFR) across all of Backblaze's drives, rising from 1.01% in 2021 to 1.37% in 2022.
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