Internal Hard Drives

Models Newly Released by Seagate

In 2020, our farm was equipped with six different Seagate drive types that were brand new. Five of these models are shown in the table above, and one was omitted since it only had 26 drives. Both migration replacements and new storage were accomplished with these drives, which varied in size from 12 to 18 terabytes and were utilized for both purposes. Their aggregate number of internal hard drive was 13,596, and they accumulated 1,783,166 drive days. They had just 46 failures, which resulted in an AFR of 0.94%.

Toshiba Provides an Increase in Zeros

Both the new Toshiba 14TB drive (model: MG07ACA14TA) and the latest Toshiba 16TB drive (model: MG08ACA16TEY) were placed in our data centres in the year 2020, and they have been putting up zeros, which means that they have not had any problems. They are off to a fantastic start despite each drive type only being installed for around two months.

When comparing the statistics for hard drives in 2018, 2019, and 2020

Below is a chart comparing the AFR for the three most recent years. Only the data for that particular year and the drive models available at the end of each year are included in the calculations for each year.

There has been a significant decrease in the annualized failure rate for 2020.

Below 1%, the annual percentage rate (AFR) for 2020 fell to 0.93%. This figure was 1.89% in the year 2019. Over fifty per cent less than the previous year's total. Therefore, why was the AFR for 2020 so low? The explanation is that it was a collaborative effort. The older internal hard drives, which included those with capacities of 4 terabytes, six terabytes, eight terabytes, and 10 terabytes, performed much better in 2020. Their average free space (AFR) dropped from 1.35% in 2019 to 0.96% in 2020. We installed over 30,000 bigger drives, including 14TB, 16TB, and 18TB capacities, and they recorded an AFR of 0.89% for 2020. This is the other extreme of the size range. Last but not least, the 12TB drives had an AFR of 0.98% in 2020. To put it another way, regardless of whether a drive was brand new, old, significant, or tiny, it fared well in our environment in 2020.