Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Google publishes hard drive failure study

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Google publishes hard drive failure study



    Amidst all its plotting to take over the Internet, Google has published (PDF) a rather interesting paper regarding the failure rates of hard drives. Studies on the subject are fairly hard to come by, but Google reckons its thousands of servers offer a good sample size to spot trends in hard drive failure rates. Google introduces the paper as follows:

    We have built an infrastructure that collects vital information about all Google's systems every few minutes, and a repository that stores these data in timeseries format (essentially forever) for further analysis. The information collected includes environmental factors (such as temperatures), activity levels and many of the Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) parameters that are believed to be good indicators of disk drive health. We mine through these data and attempt to find evidence that corroborates or contradicts many of the commonly held beliefs about how various factors can affect disk drive lifetime.

    Our paper is unique in that it is based on data from a disk population size that is typically only available from vendor warranty databases, but has the depth of deployment visibility and detailed lifetime follow-up that only an end-user study can provide.

    The results are surprising. For instance, Google's data suggest that high drive temperatures and high utilization don't necessarily translate to higher failure rates. The data also suggest that the highest failure rates occur in drives that are three years old.

    Disappointingly, Google omits to mention what might be the most important piece of information of all: which manufacturers have the most failure-prone drives. Perhaps the search giant doesn't want a lawsuit on its hands, or perhaps it doesn't want to risk compromising any juicy discounts it might receive from hard drive makers. Nevertheless, Google claims differences in failure rates between drive models or brands are not significant. "In contrast to age-related results, we note that all results shown in the rest of the paper are not affected significantly by the population mix," the paper says.
    They probably are covering their arses... I'd still like to see which brands died when.
    Wikipedia and Google.... the needles to my tangent habit.
    ________________________________________________

    That special feeling we get in the cockles of our hearts, Or maybe below the cockles, Maybe in the sub-cockle area, Maybe in the liver, Maybe in the kidneys, Maybe even in the colon, We don't know.

  • #2
    We all know don't we? WD and Maxtor. I just had another Maxtor fail yesterday. Warranty ran out in December.
    FT.

    Comment


    • #3
      Wow, thanks for a cocktease of information, google.

      Comment


      • #4
        There's a non-fluff-piece from Carnegie Mellon:

        “And, remember: there's no 'I' in 'irony'” ~ Merlin Mann

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by Fat Tone View Post
          We all know don't we?
          We all know what brands are unreliable for us, but ask a group of people and you'll get different answers. There have some occasions where a particular make/model have universally been condemned, such as IBM's Deskstars, but this is unusual.
          When you own your own business you only have to work half a day. You can do anything you want with the other twelve hours.

          Comment


          • #6
            storagereview.com have a reliability database (for which you must get an account).
            There's an Opera in my macbook.

            Comment

            Working...
            X