Sadly, @arstechnica is embarrassing themselves with their innumeracy here.
The average time-to-failure of HHDs (hybrid hard drivers) is not less than three years, and the study in question does not claim that they do.
So what went wrong....?
https://fediscience.org/@arstechnica@mastodon.social/110310597119922958 h/t @waldok
It's a form of selection bias.
The study in question looks at the failure times not of all hard drives, but *of the drives that failed*.
Of those drives, the average failure time was 2.5 years.
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@ct_bergstrom @waldok @arstechnica A _face-palmingly basic_ form of selection bias. Yeesh.
@pieist @ct_bergstrom @waldok @arstechnica "face-palming"
Couldn't have put it in better words
@ct_bergstrom @waldok @arstechnica
Obviously, in a controlled study that lasted as long as necessary, all drives would eventually fail. But in a real-world production environment like this, the great majority of drives are eventually removed from service without ever having failed.