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We recently covered a study by Secure Data Recovery, an HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery company, of 2,007 defective hard disk drives it received. It found the average time before failure among those drives to be 2 years and 10 months. That seemed like a short life span, but considering the limited sample size and analysis in Secure Data Recovery's report, there was room for skepticism. Today, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company with a reputation for detailed HDD and SSD failure analysis, followed up Secure Data Recovery's report with its own research using a much larger data set. Among the 176,155 failed HDDs Backblaze examined, the average age at which the drives failed was 2 years and 6 months.

2 years, 6 months

Backblaze arrived at this age by examining all of its failed drives and their respective power-on hours. The company recorded each drive's failure date, model, serial number, capacity, failure, and SMART raw value. The 17,155 drives examined include 72 different models and does not include failed boot drives, drives that had no SMART raw attribute data, or drives with out-of-bounds data.

If Backblaze only looked at drives that it didn't use in its data centers anymore, there would be 3,379 drives across 35 models, and the average age of failure would be a bit longer at 2 years and 7 months.

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Newegg has a quick and dirty way to pick a new NAS device and the drives that'll go in it. Announced today, the NAS Builder provides a unique, clean interface for perusing the retailer's available NAS enclosures and picking compatible HDDs or SSDs within the selected NAS device's capabilities. You're limited to Newegg's selection, and not all NAS, HDD, or SSD specs and features are disclosed through the shopping tool. But used with its limits in mind, the builder looks like a helpful starting point for NAS newcomers or even advanced users seeking a basic comparison tool.

Anyone who has shopped for tech components, be it for NAS, PC building, or a maker's project, knows how tedious, unorganized, and unreliable relevant commerce sites can be. That's why Newegg's NAS Builder initially piqued my interest.

Opening the website prompts you to pick your total capacity requirements, up to "144TB & Above," and from there, it shows you the relevant NAS devices that Newegg carries. All the expected sorting tools are there, so you can sort by price or for products with the most reviews (on Newegg), for example. Like Newegg's regular site, you can add filters like bay count and RJ-45 specs, but the NAS Builder's appearance is much cleaner with a more stripped-down set of filters than the rest of Newegg, as well as other sites NAS shoppers might frequent. Unlike NAS configurators from NAS vendors, Newegg's is more brand agnostic.

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An analysis of 2,007 damaged or defective hard disk drives (HDDs) has led a data recovery firm to conclude that "in general, old drives seem more durable and resilient than new drives."

The statement comes from a Los Angeles-headquartered HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery firm aptly named Secure Data Recovery that has been in business since 2007 and claims to have resolved more than 100,000 cases. It studied the HDDs it received in 2022. "Most" of those drives were 40GB to 10TB, according to a blog post by Secure Data Recovery spotted by Blocks & Files on Thursday.

Secure Data Recovery's March 8 post broke down the HDDs it received by engineer-verified "power-on hours," or the total amount of time the drive was functional, starting from when its owner began using it and ending when the device arrived at Secure Data Recovery.

Enlarge / SSDs not included, of course. (credit: Apex Storage )

For high-capacity storage needs, the average consumer turns to hard disk drives (HDDs). They're generally not as speedy or reliable as SSDs , but they're a heck of a lot cheaper. The Apex Storage X21 add-in card (AIC) currently making its rounds on the Internet isn't about using the most cost-effective storage, though. Instead, the expansion card, which looks to be a debut product from a not-yet-known storage company, is for people or businesses willing to spend what it takes to stock the card with up to 21 8TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs.

Tom's Hardware first spotted the website for the X21 on Sunday, and Henry Hill, in engineering and sales at the company, confirmed the product to Ars Technica via email. He said the product will cost $2,800, with discounts available for volume purchases, which will ship by Q2. Samples are already available to volume customers, he said, and consumer shipments will start "before the end of 2023."

MIke Spicer, listed as Apex Storage's founder and CEO, launched a Kickstarter in 2021 with a concept that's similar to the X21. Instead of 21 M.2 SSDs, the Apex Storage Scaler claimed to support a modest 16 SSDs. It's unclear how many, if any, of these cards reached backers. However, in July, Spicer hinted at a "V2" of the product on Twitter .

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Backblaze, a San Mateo, California-based backup and cloud storage firm, on Thursday shared data giving us a unique look at the reliability of SSDs over up to four years of use. Looking at the 2,906 SSDs in its possession, the company tracked the failure rates of mostly consumer-grade SSDs, which it started using as boot drives at the start of Q4 2018.

Backblaze has long shared data on the reliability of hard disk drives (HDDs), but this latest report provides fresh perspective on HDDs' speedier, pricier cousins. As detailed by Backblaze's blog post , the company uses SSDs for booting storage servers, as well as reading, writing, and deleting log and temporary files made by said storage servers. Backblaze said all SSDs analyzed have "similar" workloads.

Before we get into Backblaze's first table, which depicts annualized failure rates (AFRs) for 13 different SSDs models, it's important to note the limited sample size of 2,906 drives and differing number of drives for each model. Some drives have seen way more active use than others, with active days ranging from 104 days up to 724,240. So while these aren't apples-to-apples comparisons of SSD models, the table provides a broad glimpse at SSD reliability that the average person can't replicate on their own.

Enlarge / Western Digital's My Book Duo has two 3.5-inch HDDs inside. (credit: Western Digital)

Western Digital today announced bigger-capacity versions of its My Book and dual-drive My Book Duo external hard disk drives (HDDs). The new 22TB and 44TB offerings represent some of the roomiest consumer offerings the company has ever offered.

Targeting people needing large-scale options and prioritizing price per GB over speed, the new external storage devices consist of one (in the case of the 22TB My Book) or two (My Book Duo) 3.5-inch drives. Western Digital's announcement today said the 22TB My Book is its "highest capacity consumer drive ever," but, as noted by Tom's Hardware , the company started selling 22TB network-attached storage (NAS) drives ($400 MSRP as of writing) in July. But with the My Book line offering the components neatly packed into an enclosure and ready to live on top of a desk as backup storage, the series has broader appeal.

The My Book measures 5.48×1.93×6.72 inches and now goes up to 22TB. (credit: Western Digital)

The My Book Duo, which Western Digital had already been selling in 16TB to 36TB capacities, also adds ports to your setup. It has a USB-C port supporting up to 5Gbps for connecting to systems and also gives you two USB-A ports.

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SSDs have usurped hard disk drives (HDDs) when it comes to performance, but whether building a NAS or having high-capacity needs on a budget, plenty of people still rely on spinning platters. Older drives that have seen a lot of use, however, may not be as reliable as before. Data Backblaze shared this week highlights how a hard drive's average failure rate (AFR) can increase with age.

Since 2013, Backblaze, a backup and cloud-storage company, has been publishing an annual report analyzing the AFRs of hard drives in its data center. The 2022 report shared on Tuesday examines 230,921 hard drives across 29 models from HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and WDC, with capacities ranging from 4–16TB. All models included at least 60 drives that were not previously used for testing.

Keep in mind that the sample group only consists of drives that Backblaze had on hand, and they are of varying ages, with some used for more days than others. However, Backblaze's report does give us a unique look into the results of long-term hard drive use.

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The research community is excited about the potential of DNA to function as long-term archival storage. That's largely because it's extremely dense, chemically stable for tens of thousands of years, and comes in a format we're unlikely to forget how to read. While there has been some interesting progress , efforts have mostly stayed in the research community because of the high costs and extremely slow read and write speeds. These are problems that need to be solved before DNA-based storage can be practical.

So we were surprised to hear that storage giant Seagate had entered into a collaboration with a DNA-based storage company called Catalog. To find out how close the company's technology is to being useful, we talked to Catalog's CEO, Hyunjun Park. Park indicated that Catalog's approach is counterintuitive on two levels: It doesn't store data the way you'd expect, and it isn't focusing on archival storage at all.

A different sort of storage

DNA is a molecule that can be thought of as a linear array of bases, with each base being one of four distinct chemicals: A, T, C, or G. Typically, each base of the DNA molecule is used to hold two bits of information, with the bit values conveyed by the specific base that is present. So A can encode 00, T can encode 01, C can encode 10, and G can encode 11; with this encoding, the molecule AA would store 0000, while AC would store 0010, and so on. We can synthesize DNA molecules hundreds of bases long with high efficiency, and we can add flanking sequences that provide the equivalent of file system information, telling us which part of a chunk of binary data an individual piece of DNA represents.

Enlarge / Samsung's newly announced 990 PRO with Heatsink SSD. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung's 990 PRO, its latest NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, aims to give gamers, 3D-renderers, and 4K/8K video editors a decent ratio of price to performance if this top-of-the-line drive can get close to its promised specs in real-world testing.

The 990 PRO is touted as offering "nearly the highest speed currently available from the new PCIe 4.0 interface" and a 55 percent increase in random performance over its 980 Pro . Samsung touts sequential read and write speeds of 7,450 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 6,900MB/s, respectively. Random read/write speeds are listed at 1,400K and 1,550K IOPS, respectively, based on IOmeter 1.1.0 performance. DRAM for the 990 PRO drives is 1GB per terabyte of storage, up to 4GB for the 4TB model.

Samsung suggests the performance bump comes from its own V-NAND and proprietary controller advancements. Power efficiency is improved up to 50 percent over the 980 PRO, the company claims, while a nickel coating and heat-spreading label dissipate heat. The heatsink model gives you more temperature assurance while, of course, adding RGB lights.