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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.'"

4 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Did they ever name the brands? by iminplaya · · Score: 5, Interesting

    FTA:However, in this paper, we do not show a
    breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage
    due to the proprietary nature of these data.

    But, of course.

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    What?
  2. Temperature conclusion by phasm42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Their statistics on temperature seem very unusual. I'm surprised they didn't explore this more. For example, is the high failure rate associated with low temperatures because the drives were more likely to be inactive due to failure?

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    "No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
  3. Lower temp == higher failure rates by flyingfsck · · Score: 4, Interesting

    To my mind the most significant piece of info: "The gure shows that fail- ures do not increase when the average temperature in- creases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend."

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  4. They do say that "vintage" matters by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The report does say that "vintage" matters, ie. that "Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future development".

    Manufacturers have good years and bad years. The writers don't want to damn a company because it had a couple of bad years during this time period.

    Still, it's a bummer that the single most important factor goes unpublished. Even if it could cause a panic I'm sure there's some useful information in there (eg. a company to avoid like the plague).

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