The average life of hard drives does not exceed 3 years according to a study of 2007 failed drives

A 2007 analysis of damaged or failing hard disk drives (HDDs) led a data recovery firm to conclude that “Overall, older drives seem to be more reliable and reliable than new ones.”

The claim comes from a Los Angeles-headquartered hard drive, SSD and RAID data recovery company aptly named Secure Data Recovery, which has been in business since 2007 and claims to have resolved more than 100,000 cases. The company studied hard drives received in 2022. “Most” of these drives were between 40GB and 10TB, according to a Secure Data Recovery blog post discovered by Blocks & Files on Thursday.

The March 8 Secure Data Recovery post broke down received hard drives by engineer-verified “up hours,” or the total amount of time the drive was in working order, from when its owner started using it to when the device arrived in Secure. Data recovery.

The firm also determined the current number of uncompleted disk sectors, displaying “the number of bad or unusable sectors that the hard drive has generated during normal read and write operations.”The company’s data does not include hard drives that have experienced unpredictable failures or damage from unforeseen events such as power surges, malware, natural disasters and “accidental mishandling,”the company said.

Among the sample, 936 drives are from Western Digital, 559 from Seagate, 211 from Hitachi, 151 from Toshiba, 123 from Samsung, and 27 from Maxtor. Notably, 74.5 percent of hard drives were made by either Western Digital or Seagate, which accounted for 80 percent of hard drive shipments in 2021 according to Secure Data Recovery, citing data from the Digital Storage Technology newsletter provided by Forbes.

The average time to failure among the sample was 2 years and 10 months, and 2007 failed hard drives had an average of 1548 bad sectors.

“Although 1,548 bad sectors out of hundreds of millions or even billions of disk partitions may seem insignificant, the rate of development often increases and the risk of data corruption increases exponentially,” the blog says.

Secure Data Recovery isn’t the only company using its business to get storage information. As noted by Blocks & Files, backup and cloud storage company Backblaze uses hard drives that outperform the average Secure Data Recovery lifespan of hard drives customers sent in last year. At the end of 2022, 230,921 Backblaze hard drives had an average age of 3.6 years, compared to an average time to failure of 2 years and 10 months among drives that Secure Data Recovery worked on last year. Clearly, Backblaze’s sample size is much larger. In addition, his analysis is much more detailed, breaking down hard drive failure rate trends model by model. The discrepancies show problems in determining whether

Do older rims show better durability?

If you feel like hard drives aren’t built to last as long as they used to, you’re not alone. The Secure Data Recovery blog suggested a link between when a hard drive was made and how long it lasted before it failed.

We found that the top five most reliable and fault-tolerant hard drives from each manufacturer were manufactured prior to 2015. On the other hand, most of the least durable and fault tolerant hard drives from each manufacturer were produced after 2015.

Unfortunately, Secure Data Recovery did not specify what is meant by the word “majority”. But it did point to hard drive manufacturers pushing the frontiers of performance as a reason why hard drive reliability may have declined with later products. This includes size restrictions that reduce “clearance between moving parts, which appears to affect mechanical damage and wear resistance.”

Secure Data Recovery also blamed a three-letter acronym that almost became a four-letter word for storage users in 2020: SMR. The revelation that various brands, including Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba, were secretly selling devices with platter magnetic recording discs instead of CMRs (regular magnetic recording discs) shocked consumers, and Western Digital even paid $2.7 million in a class action lawsuit.

While users were primarily frustrated that drives using SMR offered slower random write speeds than drives using CMR, Secure Data Recovery also believes that SMR affects the reliability of hard drives because drives put “more stress”on components.