Google Hard drive Survey

[thescreensavers]

When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you're using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you've probably good a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives. Google studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA drives with between 80 and 400GB storage and 5400 to 7200rpm, and while unfortunately they didn't call out specific brands or models that had high failure rates, they did find a few interesting patterns in failing hard drives. One of those we thought was most intriguing was that drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn't or couldn't determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags (and that's interesting, of course, because SMART exists solely to survey hard drive health); other notable patterns showed that failure rates are indeed definitely correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age; failure rates did not correspond to drive usage except in very young and old drives (i.e. heavy data "grinding" is not a significant factor in failure); and there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot. Normally we'd recommend you go on ahead and read the document, but be ready for a seriously academic and scientific analysis.

Article

Edit: {PDF}http:// Original Google Article

 

[dartworth]

I found a few images of some regurgitated spinach...

 

[thescreensavers]

Originally posted by: dartworth
I found a few images of some regurgitated spinach...

thats ok I am good.

 

[PokerGuy]

Interesting.... it would have been really good if they actually broke down some stats by manufacturer and line / model etc. We all have anecdotal evidence (maxtor/samsung/wd/seagate/hitachi sucks! I've had 3 die in 2 years!), but none of us are in a position to really measure stats for thousands of drives for each model. I'd love to see true failure rates by model by brand and true MTBF (not the one quoted on the box, which is pure BS, go read storagereview for more info).

 

[smopoim86]

sucks for me.... my hdds will be pretty cold... Just look at my case and you'll see

 

[drum]

I'd like to subscribe to this newsletter

 

[Pepsi90919]

artical?

 

[montypythizzle]

Originally posted by: Pepsi90919
artical?

ya sew wat?

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

Originally posted by: PokerGuy
Interesting.... it would have been really good if they actually broke down some stats by manufacturer and line / model etc. We all have anecdotal evidence (maxtor/samsung/wd/seagate/hitachi sucks! I've had 3 die in 2 years!), but none of us are in a position to really measure stats for thousands of drives for each model. I'd love to see true failure rates by model by brand and true MTBF (not the one quoted on the box, which is pure BS, go read storagereview for more info).

Same. I suspect that Google is one of only a handful of companies in a position to gather the data. At the same time, none will ever have the balls to release it.

 

[PokerGuy]

Especially now that google owns youtube, can you imagine the combined storage amounts that the google empire requires? :Q

 

[ForumMaster]

so does that mean that i shouldn't use a fan on my hdd?

 

[WW]

Originally posted by: ForumMaster
so does that mean that i shouldn't use a fan on my hdd?

exactly...what does 'excessively' mean?

I wonder what is the root cause of failure for an 'excessively cooled' hard drive? vibration from the fans?

 

[miri]

ive never used a fan on a hard drive and have never had a hard drive failure.

I also have no intake fans, only exhaust fans in my case.

I have used a Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and IBM HD. None of these have failed outside of a few bad sectors on one of them.