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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."
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?
I have had 3 personal use hard drives go bad in the last 5 years, they were either Maxtor or Wester Digital. I am not hard on the drives other than leaving them on 24/7. The drives that failed were all just for data backup and I put them in big, well ventilated boxes. With this use I would think the drives would last for years (at least 5 years), but nope! The drives did not arrive broken either, they all functioned great for 1-2 years before dying. The quality of consumer hard drives nowadays is way, WAY low, and the manufacturers should do something about it.
I don't consider myself a fluke because I know quite a few other people who have had similar problems. What's the deal?
Also, does anyone else find this quote interesting?:
"and may have failed for any reason, such as a harsh environment at the customer site and intensive, random read/write operations that cause premature wear to the mechanical components in the drive."
It's a f$#*ing hard drive! Jesus H Tapdancing Christ how can they call that premature wear, do they calculate the MTTF by just letting the drive sit idle and never reading and writing to it? That actually wouldn't suprise me.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Give me 6 month failure rates.
... 60 months? That would be the info that I'd need. Where's the big failure spike? I'm going to be replacing them right before that.
Start with 100 drives. Continuous usage.
How many fail in the first 6 months? 12 months? 18 months?
Slightly off-topic, but if you haven't checked the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) info provided by your drive to see if it is having errors, you probably should. You can download smartmontools, which works on Linux/Unix and Windows. Your Linux distro may have it included, but may not have the daemon running to automatically monitor the drive (smartd).
/dev/sda do: /dev/sda /dev/sda
:-)
To view the SMART info for drive
smartctl -a
To do a full disk read check (can take hours) do:
smartctl -t long
Sadly, I just found read errors on a 375-hour-old drive (manufacturer's software claimed that repair succeeded). Fortunately, they were on the Windows partition
Thats fair, but if you pull a bad drive, ghost it (assuming its not THAT bad), plop the new drive in, and the system works flawlessly, what are you to assume?
I dont really care to know exactly what is wrong with the drive. If i replace it, and the problem goes away, I would consdier that a bad drive. Even if you could still read and write to it. I just did one this morning that showed no symptoms other than windows taking what I considered a long time, to boot. All the user complained about was sluggish performance, and there were no errors or drive noises to speak of. Problem fixed, user happy, drive bad.
As I already posted, a good rule of thumb is 3 years from the date of manufacture, is when most drives go bad.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
...is that it detects SMART disk errors in normal use (i.e. you don't have to be watching the BIOS screens when your PC boots).
When I was trying the Vista RC, it told me that my drive was close to failing. I, of course, didn't believe it at first, but I ran the Seagate test floppy and it agreed. So I sent it back to Seagate for a free replacement.
About the only feature that impressed me in Vista, sadly. (And I'm not sure it should have impressed me, tbh. I'm assuming XP never did this as I've never seen/heard of such a feature.)