Disk Drive Failures 15 Times What Vendors Say

jcatcw writes "A Carnegie Mellon University study indicates that customers are replacing disk drives more frequently than vendor estimates of mean time to failure (MTTF) would require.. The study examined large production systems, including high-performance computing sites and Internet services sites running SCSI, FC and SATA drives. The data sheets for the drives indicated MTTF between 1 and 1.5 million hours. That should mean annual failure rates of 0.88%, annual replacement rates were between 2% and 4%. The study also shows no evidence that Fibre Channel drives are any more reliable than SATA drives."

Comments

Re:Interface matters why?

[ender-]

TFA seems surprised by SATA drives lasting as long as Fibre...why one earth would your data interface have any consequences on the drive internals? Or are we talking assuming Interface = Data Throughput?

That statement is based on the long-held assumption that hard drive manufacturers put better materials and engineering into enterprise-targeted drives [Fibre] than they put into consumer-level drives [SATA].

Guess not...

Seagate

[mabu]

After 12 years of running Internet servers, I won't put anything but Seagate SCSI drives in any mission critical servers. My experience indicates Seagate drives are superior. Who's the worst? Quantum. The only thing Quantum drives are good for is starting a fire IMO.

Re:Masters of estimates

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Well, the hard-drive makers are correct on the size thing - a Gigabyte is 1000 Megabytes, and the OS and software makers are wrong.

Yeah, they coined the term and have been using it for 40 years, but they're wrong.

Gigabytes are actually displayed as Gigabytes, or that the listing is changed to correctly display Gibibytes as the value? (or Kibibytes, Mebibytes, whatever)

Listen, just because someone comes up with a standard doesn't obligate everyone to use it, especially when they already have a perfectly workable system already. Claiming that NIST can impose an unwanted standard on the world is like saying that it isn't a word until the OED lists it.