hard drives

12-years-of-hdd-analysis-brings-insight-to-the-bathtub-curve’s-reliability

12 years of HDD analysis brings insight to the bathtub curve’s reliability

Backblaze, hard disk drive, hard drive, hard drives, hdd, hdds, Tech / /

But as seen in Backblaze’s graph above, the company’s HDDs aren’t adhering to that principle. The blog’s authors noted that in 2021 and 2025, Backblaze’s drives had a “pretty even failure rate through the significant majority of the drives’ lives, then a fairly steep spike once we get into drive failure territory.”

The blog continues:

What does that mean? Well, drives are getting better, and lasting longer. And, given that our trendlines are about the same shape from 2021 to 2025, we should likely check back in when 2029 rolls around to see if our failure peak has pushed out even further.

Speaking with Ars Technica, Doyle said that Backblaze’s analysis is good news for individuals shopping for larger hard drives because the devices are “going to last longer.”

She added:

In many ways, you can think of a datacenter’s use of hard drives as the ultimate test for a hard drive—you’re keeping a hard drive on and spinning for the max amount of hours, and often the amount of times you read/write files is well over what you’d ever see as a consumer. Industry trend-wise, drives are getting bigger, which means that oftentimes, folks are buying fewer of them. Reporting on how these drives perform in a data center environment, then, can give you more confidence that whatever drive you’re buying is a good investment.

The longevity of HDDs is also another reason for shoppers to still consider HDDs over faster, more expensive SSDs.

“It’s a good idea to decide how justified the improvement in latency is,” Doyle said.

Questioning the bathtub curve

Doyle and Paterson aren’t looking to toss the bathtub curve out with the bathwater. They’re not suggesting that the bathtub curve doesn’t apply to HDDs, but rather that it overlooks additional factors affecting HDD failure rates, including “workload, manufacturing variation, firmware updates, and operational churn.” The principle also makes the assumptions that, per the authors:

  • Devices are identical and operate under the same conditions
  • Failures happen independently, driven mostly by time
  • The environment stays constant across a product’s life

While these conditions can largely be met in datacenter environments, “conditions can’t ever be perfect,” Doyle and Patterson noted. When considering an HDD’s failure rates over time, it’s wise to consider both the bathtub curve and how you use the component.

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the-diskmantler-violently-shakes-hard-drives-for-better-rare-earth-recovery

The DiskMantler violently shakes hard drives for better rare-earth recovery

e-waste, electronics recycling, hard drives, hdd, hdds, rare earth, rare earth elements, rare earth magnets, rare earth metals, Tech / /

Rare-earth magnet recycling —

A nifty HDD disassembly tool, sure, but we also have a larger global need for magnets.

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From magnets we came, to magnets we return.

Enlarge / From magnets we came, to magnets we return.

Garner Products

There is the mental image that most people have of electronics recycling, and then there is the reality, which is shredding.

Less than 20 percent of e-waste even makes it to recycling. That which does is, if not acquired through IT asset disposition (ITAD) or spotted by a worker who sees some value, heads into the shredder for raw metals extraction. If you’ve ever toured an electronics recycling facility, you can see for yourself how much of your stuff eventually gets chewed into little bits, whether due to design, to unprofitable reuse markets, or sheer volume concerns.

Traditional hard drives have some valuable things inside them—case, cover, circuit boards, drive assemblies, actuators, and rare-earth magnets—but only if they avoid the gnashing teeth. That’s where the DiskMantler comes in. Garner Products, a data elimination firm, has a machine that it claims can process 500 hard drives (the HDD kind) per day in a way that leaves a drive separated into those useful components. And the DiskMantler does this by shaking the thing to death (video).

  • Insert the drive into the DiskMantler like you’re nostalgic for the VCR days.

    Garner Products

  • The DiskMantler shakes the drive until the screws fly out of the thing.

    Garner Products

  • The disassembled drive pops out or lands on a conveyor belt.

    Garner Products

  • The component parts that the DiskMantler breaks down to.

    Garner Products

  • The DiskMantler itself, which needs an air supply and power.

    Garner Products

The DiskMantler, using “shock, harmonics, and vibration,” vibrates most drives into pieces in between 8–90 seconds, depending on how much separation you want. Welded helium drives take about two minutes. The basic science for how this works came from Gerhard Junker, the perfectly named German scientist who fully explored the power of vibrations, or “shear loading perpendicular to the fastener axis,” to loosen screws and other fasteners.

As Garner’s chief global development officer, Michael Harstrick, told E-Scrap News, the device came about when a client needed a way to extract circuit boards from drives fastened with proprietary screw heads. Prying or other destruction would have been too disruptive and potentially damaging. After testing different power levels and durations, Garner arrived at a harmonic vibration device that can take apart pretty much any drive, even those with more welding than screws. “They still come apart,” Harstrick told E-Scrap News. “It just takes a little bit.”

Improving the recovery and sorting ease of hard drives is itself a useful thing, but the potential for rare-earth magnet recycling is particularly attractive. Most rare-earth magnet recycling involves “long-loop” recycling, or breaking them down into rare earth elements and then putting those back into the magnet production stream, which is energy-intensive and not very cost-effective. Electric vehicles and wind turbines have huge amounts of rare-earth magnets in them but rarely see recycling. Hard drives, while individually small, are massive in scale, with roughly 259 million shipped in 2021.

One Canadian firm, based on a University of Birmingham-patented process, wants to reuse drive magnets more directly, creating new sources that don’t require extraction and aren’t quite so globally concentrated. That Canadian firm, HyProMag, uses robotics to find and extract drives’ permanent magnets, then sends the rest of the disk off for recycling.

The technology is not all there yet, but soon enough, it looks like something interesting will shake out.

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