Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability

oski4410 writes "The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: 'Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.'"

Comments

DUH

[Lord Kano]

Did anyone else find that data?

Google it.

LK

Re:You guuuyyys...

[avalys]

Why should we have our screens cluttered up with "PDF ALERT! PDF ALERT!" because you can't figure out how to configure your system properly?

If you're too lazy or lacking in knowledge, buy a Mac - PDFs load instantly in OS X right out of the box.

Proprietary reporting

[fred911]

Here's what they will tell us:

"One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent
pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature
drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels."

"Our results confirm the findings of previous smaller
population studies that suggest that some of the SMART
parameters are well-correlated with higher failure probabilities.
We find, for example, that after their first scan
error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60
days than drives with no such errors."

er not...

"Despite those strong correlations, we find that
failure prediction models based on SMART parameters
alone are likely to be severely limited in their prediction
accuracy, given that a large fraction of our failed drives
have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever."

That's all they're willing to offer the public (probably for free).
Useless...

  Do no evil??? how bout make no data free..

ps.. all their farm is ata/ide?