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Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong

Posted by kdawson on from the mean-time dept.

modapi writes "Google's wasn't the best storage paper at FAST '07. Another, more provocative paper looking at real-world results from 100,000 disk drives got the 'Best Paper' award. Bianca Schroeder, of CMU's Parallel Data Lab, submitted Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? The paper crushes a number of (what we now know to be) myths about disks such as vendor MTBF validity, 'consumer' vs. 'enterprise' drive reliability (spoiler: no difference), and RAID 5 assumptions. StorageMojo has a good summary of the paper's key points."

5 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. moving parts by DogDude · · Score: 5, Funny

    Every single mechanism with moving parts will fail. It's just a matter of when. In a few years, when everybody is using solid state drives, people will look back and shake their heads, wondering why we were using spinning magnetic platters to hold all of our critical data for such a long time.

    --
    I don't respond to AC's.
    1. Re:moving parts by theReal-Hp_Sauce · · Score: 5, Funny

      Forget Solid State Drives, soon we'll have Isolinear Chips. It wont matter if they fail or not because as long as the story line supports it Geordie can re-route the power through some other subsystem, Data can move the chips around really quickly, Picard can "make it so", and after it's all over with Wesley can wear a horrible sweater and deliver a really cheese line.

      -C

  2. Re:Dr. Schroeder is pretty hot, too! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Except she requires a MTBF of more than 3 seconds. Sorry dude.

  3. Human MTBF by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 4, Funny
    MTBF of a human until gross catastophic failure (ie. death) is approx 50 years which is approx 440,000 hours.

    Of course if we count relatively minor failures (like forgetting to take out the trash or pick up dirty underwear), then MTBF is approx 27 minutes!

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  4. Re:"Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong" by egr · · Score: 4, Funny

    I've read the article, then the tittle, damn!