It appears to be related to the aging of the entire drive fleet, and we expect this number to go down as older drives retire over the next year. The aging 4TB Seagate drives are part of the increase, but the failure rates of both the Toshiba and HGST drives have also increased over the last year. In Q2, the AFR increased to 1.46% for all drive models combined.We have deployed our drive cloning program for these drives as part of our data durability program, and over the next several months, we will cycle these drives out.

Their quarterly failure rate has increased each of the last four quarters to 3.42% this quarter. They have served us well, but they appear tired after nearly seven years of constant spinning.

The 4TB Seagate drives (ST4000DM000) show their average age at 80.3 months.

Still, any of these drives may continue to post great numbers over the coming quarters. We need at least 500,000 drive days in a quarter to get to a 95% confidence interval. For example, the 16TB Toshiba had the most drive days-32,064-of any of these drive models. As with the 4TB Toshiba noted above, these drives have extensive confidence interval gaps driven by a limited number of data points.

Three other drives had zero failures this quarter: the 8TB HGST (model: HUH728080ALE604), the 14TB Toshiba (model: MG07ACA14TEY), and the 16TB Toshiba (model: MG08ACA16TA).

Still, they could last another 97 years at one failure per year-probably not. Their lifetime AFR is just 0.79%, although their lifetime confidence interval gap is 1.3%, which we've seen means we lack enough data to be truly confident of the AFR number.

The last failure was recorded a year ago in Q2 2021.

Our collection's next oldest drive cohort, the 4TB Toshiba drives (MD04ABA400V) at 85.3 months, had zero failures for Q2.

We hope these drives to be cycled out in the future, but with their lifetime AFR at just 0.87%, they are not first in line. Still, this was the first failure by this drive model since Q3 of last year.

Given that this is our fleet's oldest drive model with an average age of 86.7 months of service, a failure or two is expected. The 6TB Seagate HDD drives (model: ST6000DX000) finally had a failure this quarter-actually, two losses.

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