learning storage —
Lifetime AFRs grew, whereas quarterly AFRs went from 1.54% in Q1 to 2.28% in Q2.
Scharon Harding
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Backblaze’s quarterly updates on annualized failure charges (AFRs) for its arsenal of laborious disk drives (HDDs) have supplied distinctive perception into long-term storage use for over 10 years. Today, the backup and cloud storage firm launched Q2 2023 information, which explores an intriguing enhance in AFRs.
Today’s weblog publish particulars information for 240,940 HDDs that Backblaze makes use of for information storage all over the world. There are 31 totally different fashions, and Backblaze’s Andy Klein, who authored the weblog, estimated in an e-mail to Ars Technica that 15 p.c of the HDDs within the dataset, together with among the 4, 6, and 8TB drives, are consumer-grade. The dataset would not embody boot drives, drives in fee for testing functions, or drive fashions for which Backblaze did not have at the very least 60 items.
One of the most important revelations from analyzing the drives from April 1, 2023, by means of June 30, 2023, was a rise in AFR from Q1 2023 (1.54 p.c) to Q2 2023 (2.28 p.c). Backblaze’s Q1 dataset examined 237,278 HDDs throughout 30 fashions.
Of course, that AFR enhance alone is not sufficient to warrant any panic. Since quarterly AFR numbers are “volatile,” Klein advised Ars Technica, Backblaze additional evaluates each quarter-to-quarter and lifelong tendencies “to see if what happened was an anomaly or something more.”
So, Klein began digging additional by grouping the drives by capability. This is as a result of, as Klein defined to Ars:
A Backblaze storage vault consists of 1,200 drives of the identical dimension, with 60 drives in 20 storage servers. If we grouped the drives strictly by age and wished to exchange simply the oldest drives in a given Backblaze vault, we’d solely change these drives within the vault that met the outdated age standards, not all of the drives. Then, a yr from now, we’d do it once more, and the yr after that, and so on. By utilizing the typical age by drive dimension, we will, as acceptable, change/improve all the drives in a vault directly.
After eliminating drives that Backblaze thought-about younger (underneath 5 years outdated), Backblaze got here up with the beneath line graph, homing in on quarterly AFRs for its 4, 6, 8, and 10TB HDDs. And trying on the chart beneath, the strains for the ten and 8TB fashions stand out:
Moving to lifetime AFRs
Digging even deeper to see if it is actually 8TB and 10TB drives growing the drives’ AFR, Backblaze turned to lifetime AFRs, which have a look at information from drives with an age of 10 years, 2 months, 10 days, with the oldest drive (a 6TB Seagate ST6000DX000) being about 10 years, 2 months outdated.
The lifetime AFR for Backblaze’s laborious drives increased 0.05 p.c from the previous quarter (1.4 p.c) to now (1.45 p.c). Big drivers for that change have been 10TB HDDs, in addition to 8TB ones.
Backblaze has far more 8TB drives (24,891) than 10TB ones (1,124). So, Klein grouped the 8TB drives by mannequin. Klein advised Ars that every of the drive fashions beneath had over 50,000 drive days for the quarter and over 2 million drive days of their lifetime.
“For all three models, the increase of the lifetime annualized failure rate from Q1 to Q2 is 10 percent or more, which is statistically similar to the 12 percent increase for all of the 8TB drive models. If you had to select one drive model to focus on for migration, any of the three would be a good candidate,” Klein’s weblog says.
What have we realized?
The government advised Ars that years of information assortment like this have taught Backblaze that the failure rate of a given mannequin doesn’t predict the failure rate of different fashions of the identical dimension or by the identical producer:
That’s why as soon as we recognized the 8TB drives because the potential drawback, we needed to dig into the model-specific numbers. In this case, all the fashions have been comparable of their enhance in failure charges, nevertheless it might have been simply as possible that they weren’t.
One factor to recollect is that we’re trying on the change in failure charges over time, not the precise failure charges themselves. We are trying for uncommon adjustments exterior of what we’d anticipate.
Looking at detailed drive information like this provides Backblaze an intimate look into its storage setting so it could make any vital changes.
“We have a drive migration program to move from smaller drives to larger drives to improve storage density in a given Backblaze vault. For economic reasons, we start with the smallest drives and then consider other details, such as failure rates, in the process. To that end, the analysis we did is being used to help prioritize which Backblaze vaults are upgraded,” Klein advised Ars.
For customers contemplating a brand new HDD for private use, (however not as a part of a RAID array) Klein suggested in search of a mannequin they “believe fails the least.”
He added:
But the distinction between a 1 p.c and a couple of p.c failure rate is moot when you don’t again up your stuff some place else. Relying on a single drive, HDD or SSD, as your sole supply of information storage is a ticking time bomb. Whether a drive lasts 2 years or 10 years, it can fail.
Backblaze’s full dataset is out there to the general public for free on its web site.
…. to be continued
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