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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.'"

6 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. So by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    are Western Digital and Maxtor really crap or not ?

    Google should name and shame...

  2. You guuuyyys... by iminplaya · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    PDF alert, Okay? Now I have to crash my browser because the download won't finish.

    --
    What?
    1. Re:You guuuyyys... by westyvw · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      What browser? Dont you have a kpdf or xpdf ready to read it???? DUH

  3. With all of Google's cash... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    you'd think they could afford statisticians. Survival analysis anyone? http://cran.r-project.org/

  4. So this article.. by shiningdays · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    has quite a few grammatical errors. Is this a result of disk failure?

  5. Samsung! by Angstroem · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    I had such a drive. Started making ticking noises while getting dog slow. SMART reported zilch... No reallocation count going up, no seek times going up, nothing... And just before I could copy it to another drive, it died.

    So much for ever buying a Samsung drive again, as I noticed after a short search on the net that I'm not the only one experiencing such problems.