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Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability

Posted by Zonk on from the fun-saturday-night-reading dept.

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.'"

3 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Similar paper by reset_button · · Score: 4, Informative

    I was at the talk, and it was very interesting. CMU also had a paper (PDF) about disk failures in the same conference (in fact, they presented one after the other).

  2. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are several SMART signals which are highly correlated with drive errors, but the authors note that 56% of the failed drives had no occurrences of these highly correlated errors. Even considering all SMART signals, 36% of failed drives still had no SMART signals reported.

    So, if you have errors in those highly correlated categories your drives are probably going to fail, but if you do not have errors in these categories your drives can still fail.

  3. You can get IDE/SATA drives FAILURE RATES Here by Augur · · Score: 5, Informative

    One of largest retailers in Russia (and maybe in Europe - more than 300 terminals for orders in person at ex-factory building, busy 24/7) "Pro Sunrise" released information on failure rates of major components (CPU, Videocards, motherboards, IDE/SATA, etc) of PC they sold for Q1-Q2 of 2005.

    http://pro.sunrise.ru/articletext.asp?reg=30&id=28 3 - the article (in russian, but diagrams are self-explanatory).

    http://pro.sunrise.ru/docs/30/image001.gif - IDE/SATA (3.5" formfactor)

    http://pro.sunrise.ru/docs/30/image002.gif - HDD (2.5" notebook formfactor)

    In short, most returns are for Maxtor brand. Lowest - IBM/Hitachi.

    Toshiba is worst in 2.5", and Seagate is best.

    The chance to be blown are between 1/20 (Maxtor) to 1/70 (Hitachi).