According to that 10^14 metric I should see read errors just about every month. Except I have just about zero.
Current disks are ~4 years, runs 24/7, and excluding a bad cable incident I've had a single case of a read error (recoverable, thanks ZFS).
I suspect those URE numbers are made by the manufacturers figuring out they can be sure the disk will do 10^14, but they don't actually try to find the real number because 10^14 is good enough.
And before that I have been using 8x WD Reds 3TB for 6-7 years, which have 10^14 in the specs[2], and had the same experience with those.
Yes smaller size, but I ran scrubbing on those biweekly, and over so many years?
[1]: https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ir...
[2]: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
I am inclined to agree. However, I have one thought to the contrary. When a mechanical drive is failing, you tend to have debris inside the drive hitting the platters, causing damage that creates more debris, accelerating the drive’s eventual death, with read errors becoming increasingly common while it happens. When those are included in averages, the 10^14 might very well be accurate. I have not done any rigorous analysis to justify this thought and I do not have the data to be able to do that analysis. It is just something that occurs to me that might justify the 10^14 figure.
That's 10^14 bits for a consumer drive. That's just 12TB. A heavy user (lots of videos or games) would see a bit flip a couple times a year.