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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."
Didn't we already see this evidence with Google's report?
user corith signing off...
The data sheets for the drives indicated MTTF between 1 and 1.5 million hours.
Yeah, but I bet they didn't say what planet those hours are on.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
...Carnegie Mellon researchers can't tell a mean from a median. This is inherently a long-tailed distribution in which the mean will be much higher than the median. Imagine a simple situation in which failure rates are 50%/yr, but those that last beyond a year last a long time. Mean time to failure might be 1000 years. You simply can't compare the statistics the way they have without knowing a lot more about the distribution than I saw in the article. Perhaps I missed it while skimming.
Yes, I am SHOCKED that companies have implemented a systematic program of distorting the truth in order to increase profits.
I propose a new term for the heinous practice---"marketing".
The truth is an offense, but not a sin.------R. N. Marley
Yeh. Don't rely on the HDD after it surpasses its' manufacturer warranty.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Disk Drive Failures 15 Times What Vendors Say [...] That should mean annual failure rates of 0.88% [but] annual replacement rates were between 2% and 4%.
0.88 * 15 = 4?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
In the article, they mention that the study didn't track actual failures, just the how often customers *thought* there was a failure and replaced their drive. There are all sorts of reasons someone might think a drive has failed. They're not all correct. I can't begin to guess what percentage of those perceived failures were for real.
This study is not news. All it says is that people *think* their hard drives fail more often than the mean time to failure.
I've still got quite a few of them, sizes ranging from 20MB - 2GB. Still operational (I presume). I wonder if those'd count towards the average?
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.
I just can't believe that the same vendors that would misrepresent the capacity of their disk by redefining a Gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes instead of 1,073,741,824 bytes would misrepresent their MTBF too! And by the way, nobody actually runs a statistically significant sample set their equipment for 10,000 hours to arrive at a MTBF of 10,000 hours, so isn't their methodology a little suspect in the first place?
I feel sorry for anyone buying drives on the low end of that range. A MTTF of 1 hour really sucks.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
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?
I've got a big ol' 5-inch 20MB hard drive whirring at home still...
In fact, my TRS-80 is still functional too...the tape drive is a little wonky, but what are ya gonna do?
Living With a Nerd
At any given time, the drive has a finite probability of failing in the next 30 days of normal use.
When this probability is high enough, you should replace it or take actions (like more frequent backups) that raise your tolerance for failure.
Imagine drives had a failure rate similar to radioactive decay:
2% of drives failed in the 1st year,
2% of the remaining drives failed in the 2nd year,
2% of the remaining drives failed in the 3rd year,
and so on.
Why should I replace my 5 year old drive with an identical new one? I shouldn't.
However, that's not the real world. In the real world, drives are more like cars - a drive with the equivalent of 100,000 miles and 10 years on it is a lot more likely to have a mechanical breakdown than one with 6 months and 5,000 miles.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
- the MTTF is always much lower than the observed time to disk replacement
- SATA is not necessarily less reliable than FC and SCSI disks
- contrary to popular belief, hard drive replacement rates to not enter steady state after the first year of operation, and in fact steadily increase over time.
- early onset of wear-out has a stronger impact on replacement than infant mortality.
- they show that the common assumptions that the time between failure follows an exponential distribution, and that failures are independent, are not correct.
It was an interesting paper (won the best paper award) at this year's FAST (File and Storage Technologies) conference. Here is a link to the paper, and the summary from the conference.Is there anyone out there that actually believed the published MTBF figures, even BEFORE these articles came out?
It's hard to take someone seriously when they claim that their drives have a 100+ year MTBF, especially since precious few are still functional after 1/10th of that much use. To make it better, many drives are NOT rated for continuous use, but only a certain number of hours per day. I didn't know that anyone EVER believed the MTBF B.S..
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I didn't notice anything in the article that would indicate that they only took into account drive being replaced due to failure. It seems like this would be common sense, but I'd like some verification that only drive-failures were being included in this "replacement" study.
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
Slashdot has a high rate of RAID, which is a bad thing. Which is a bad thing. It has been a whole 9 days. Slashdot needs a story moderation system so dupe articles can get modded out of existance. Ditto for slashdot editors who do the duping!
Can we get redundant posting on the story about google's paper?
:wq
I thought storage-related redundancy was supposed to be a good thing ;)
Unfortunately the data was skewed by one large web site that reported it's results multiple times.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
One of the things that bugged me last time this report was on /. was that 2 of the three sources reported that memory was replaced after 20% or more of their system failures. That seems pretty odd because in my experience memory hardly ever just goes bad. Sure sometimes it's bad right out of the box which is why I test every module that I buy but once it's installed and test memory tends to keep working just about forever. If that number is off then I wonder how seriously I should take their other numbers.
Samsung seems to have pretty decent QC at this time. I have no issues with them. OTH, I have seen maxtors die with less than 2 years on them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, the hard-drive makers are correct on the size thing - a Gigabyte is 1000 Megabytes, and the OS and software makers are wrong. I wish the software side would fix this problem. Does anybody know of any way to change preferences in MacOS or Windows so that filesizes are read out correctly? i.e, that Gigabytes are actually displayed as Gigabytes, or that the listing is changed to correctly display Gibibytes as the value? (or Kibibytes, Mebibytes, whatever)
... and then they built the supercollider.
High rate of failure? That's a bunch of
Table-ized A.I.
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.
A good rule of thumb is 3 years. Most hard drives fail in 3 years. I dont know why, but im currently seeing alot of bad 2004 branded drives and consider that right on schedule. Last year the 02-03 drives were the ones failing left and right. I just pulled one this morning thats stamped march 04. Just started acting up a few days ago. Like clockwork.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I've noticed this personally. Now, anecdotal evidence doesn't count for a lot, and it may be a case that we are pushing our drives more. But back in the day of 40MB hard drives that cost a fortune, they used to last forever. The only drive I ever had fail on me in the old days were the Syquest removable HD cartridges, for obvious reasons. But even they didn't fail that often, considering the extra wear-and-tear of having a removable platter with separate heads in the drive.
But these days, with our high-capacity ATA drives, I see hard drives failing every month. Sure, the drives are cheap and huge, but they don't seem to make them like they used to. I guess it's just a consequence of pushing the storage and speed to such high levels, and cheap mass-production. Although the drives are cheap, if somebody doesn't back up their data, the costs are incalculable if the data is valuable.
... and then they built the supercollider.
You're misinterpreting MTBF. A 100 year MTBF does not mean the drive will last 100 years, it means that 1/100 drives will fail each year. There will be another spec somewhere which specifies the design lifetime. For the Fujitsu MHT2060ATdrive which was in my laptop the MTBF is 300 000 hours, but the component life is a crappy 20 000 hours or 3 years - 93% of drives should make it that far given the MTBF. After the end of the design lifetime, all bets are off.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
When I was in high school in 1995, I was a network intern. We had a 486 Novell Netware server for the high school building. The actual admin was a LOTR fan, and named it GANDALF, others were SAMWISE, etc. One day about four years ago, a friend of mine who worked for the school district calls me and says, "hey, I saw Gandalf in the dumpster today. I thought you might want him, so I grabbed him."
Besides nostalgia, there wasn't a lot I could do with a giant, noisy 486 anymore, so I ended up just pulling the SCSI interface and drive for use in another machine I had and dumping the rest. I was living in a trailer at the time, and was using a closet as my "server room." After about six months of service, the machine died on me. Everything inside the case had a crust on it. It turned out that I had a roof leak in the closet, and it eventually soaked and killed the machine.
Anyway, it's 2007 and I'm still using that drive in a Samba print server. It's still alive despite a decade having passed and it being soaked with rainwater.
They aren't useful yet. Given the crowd, won't be until they're rethought.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Not that this is actually relevant or anything, but there's been a long-standing schism between the computing community and the scientific community concerning the meaning of the SI prefixes Kilo, Mega, and Giga. Until computers showed up, Kilo, Mega, and Giga referred exclusively to multipliers of exactly 1,000, 1,000,000, and 1,000,000,000, respectively. Then, when computers showed up and people had to start speaking of large storage sizes, the computing guys overloaded the prefixes to mean powers of two which were "close enough." Thus, when one speaks of computer storage, Kilo, Mega, and Giga refer to 2**10, 2**20, and 2**30 bytes, respectively. Kilo, Mega, and Giga, when used in this way, are properly slang, but they've gained traction in the mainstream, causing confusion among members of differing disciplines.
As such, there has been a decree to give the powers of two their own SI prefix names. The following have been established:
These new prefixes are gaining traction in some circles. If you have a recent release of Linux handy, type /sbin/ifconfig and look at the RX and TX byte counts. It uses the new prefixes.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
0.88% != 0.88
0.0088 * 15 = 0.132 (13%)
13% you say? The excerpt says 2%-4%. RTA and you'll see though they report up to 13% on some systems.
Sigh.
As Schwartz put it recently, there are two kinds of disk: Those that have failed, and those that are going to.
you had me at #!
Hell, nowadays I wouldn't rely on one single drive before it reaches warranty. Usually by the time of the smaller warranty's (1yr) you've accumulated enough important stuff to make the data-loss much more painful than the cost of the replacement drive.
Now in some cases manufacturers with longer warranties are stating that they have more faith in their product, and certainly the sudden drop in warranty length (from 2-3 years down to one for many) indicates a lack of faith in their products.
Basically, a warranty isn't so much your guarantee on a product so much it says:
This warranty length gives us the maximal profit on drive sales vs returns. In other words, any longer than that and the returns are going to eat into the company's profits, but there will be drive deaths both before and after that term. Nowadays a three year warranty isn't any sort of guarantee of such longevity, but rather the point at which the manufacturer is no longer willing to eat the cost of returns.
I burned all my mod points this morning, and this one definitely deserves +X informative.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
There's a big difference between a drive failure and a drive replacement.
Just because Seagate/Western replace a drige doesn't mean that drive is toast. It means someone has a problem with it. Sometimes the problem is bad cabling. Sometimes the problem is bad cooling. Sometimes the problem is outside the box, sitting at a keyboard.
Heck some people will get a new hard drive because they don't know how to reload the OS... very very often! Let's say someone unenlightened gets a boot-time error message, so they call tech support and the techie has them run a diagnostic tool... but they can't get it to run because the thing won't boot. The kid sets up an RMA, the customer gets a new blank drive, pops it in, and since there's nothing on the drive, it tries to boot off the CD-Rom. Windows Setup loads and the machine is magically "fixed". It would have been better fixed by changing the boot order in the BIOS, and doing a repair install, but the average user doesn't know all that "nerdy hacker stuff", and the average tech support drone is quite happy with the bad, easy solution. After all, India doesn't pay for the hard drive, Dell/HP/Toshiba do. Another problem is that stupid users think they're smarter than the tech they called (they're often right, but let's not go there). If they're staring at a blue screen, and you give them a 5 minute fix that brings it all back, a lot of idiots will say "You didn't fix it. It's gonna break again. I still want a new hard drive!". Personally I'd ship them a box of TNT but that usually doesn't show up as an option in the RMA part list. So you send the idiot a new hard drive, even when you know it's perfectly fine. Worst case, the guys in receiving will test the returned drive and put it back on the shelf.
Now hard drives do actually fail from time to time, but not nearly as often as people seem to think. I learned the hard way about hard drive reliability. I used to be the alpha geek teenager who crammed a half dozen hard drives with handmade rounded ATA cables and a sparkomatic power supply, the one that comes with the $20 cheapo chassis at your local asian importer. Oh yeah, the CPU was an overclocked Athlon T-Bird, often mistaken for an industrial heating unit. Fastest ghetto RAID array in town only I had dead drives every six months.
Then one day I started putting those same drives in a well ventilated chassis with top-quality cables, power supplies and lots of big efficient fans right up against the drive rails. I crack the case open every now and then to clean out any dust buildup, perhaps every 6 to 8 weeks or so.. doesn't even require a shutdown. I haven't had a drive fail in four years, seriously! And I'm talking about 20 drives here across my 3 main rigs, they get the living tar beat out of them on a daily basis. Random luck certainly has a play in all of this, but my point is a lot of failures can be prevented. I'd like to think a lot of physical failures could also be avoided if the damned manufacturers would spend a little more time and money on reliability. Sell me a drive that costs up to 30% more, but has subtle improvements that lead to a noticeably longer lifetime. Most people won't get it, they'd rather get a drive that dies twice as often but costs 30% LESS... just look at all the Nova DVD players Wal-Mart sold over the holidays... humans are cheap ignorant reptiles, that's just nature.
For the other 10% whose time and data are actually worth something, there is a market for disaster-proof drives. Heck, just sandwich two disks with mirroring and have it tell me when one of them's on the fritz. That's what I end up doing anyway, only my current method involves buying an overpriced RAID controller. Well if I considered my data so important that I chose to spend $400 on a controller to RAID up a pair of $75 hard drives, I don't think I'd have a problem spending even $200 on a single unit that does it all in one neat package, I'd still be about 300 bucks ahead, and instead of me giving all that cash to Adaptec/
-Billco, Fnarg.com
...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.)
Slashdot does have story moderation system now. It is called firehose - you can find a link in the menu at the top of the screen. It allows you to give thumbs up or thumbs down to a story as well as marking a story with feedback such as dupe or typo, in addition to the normal tagging system.
I both gave this story a thumbs down and dupe feedback, however, so many other people moderated the story up that it was at the highest (visible) ranking by the time it got posted. Apparently a bunch of people missed the story the first time around, or didn't realize this was the same study or something. I guess I can't really blame the editors for giving users what they want.
Source?
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
...to those of you who haven't managed 24x7x365 servers very much. And little news to those of you who have a computer at all.
.7" thin piece of junk. died often. Even Compaq admitted these were bad.
I expect most desktop drives to last 5 years max. MAX. No manufacturer has an edge. It's just the way it is. MTBF is fiction.
For an always-on server, I expect failures about every 3-4 years. For my clients who cared enough to pay for the very best, I replaced the drives in the 3rd year without waiting. No failures costa a bit more.
My experience is that Seagate and Fujitsu are my best server drives. IBM was also on the list, but I'm watching Hitachi. No decision.
The losers: Quantum (thankfully gone), Samsung (until recently), Maxtor. Not my opinion, my experience.
Now, in fairness, these are some of my historical losers:
Seagate: Early IDE drives and the 'stiction' problem. Remember banging drives to get them started?
Quantum 'Bigfoot' drives: popular in Compaq machines, the 5.25"
Seagate SCSI drives: Many different types had a bad habit of going off-line for no apparent reason. Your Novell server would log the 'device deactivated to a non-media defect' error. Just restarting the bus controller would sometimes wake them up. Sometimes repowering the drives. Would happen every few months. Usually when I was elsewhere...
And then there was Miniscribe.
But MTBF numbers are universally fiction. Imagine trying to sell the idea of a wave bearing lasting 16 years to an engineer with real-world experience. I figure MTBF numbers come out of the marketing department.
-rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The whole calculated MTBF thing is a sham. It is based on figures compiled by large telcos 20 or 30 years ago. The result of a calculated MTBF bears zero relationship to reality and the university is calling the bluff of the manufacturers.
The only use of a calculated MTBF, is to call attention to potentially stressed components during the design cycle, but even that is dubious. The actual figures are totally meaningless actually and is really just a number, where greater numbers usually means better, but not necessarily.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
And those lying road signs, too. Everyone knows there should be 1024 meters in a kilometer!
Wouldn't that be called a 'kebimeter'?
I wonder if anyone has tried to develop a system that limits hard disk activity to boot up and shutdown. Like hibernation in a way. Then everything else takes place in memory, lots of memory. Yes, you're subject to losing data in the event of a power failure or application crash. However, with a decent UPS, there's time to retreat that data to disk before powering off. And some applications are mature enough that they don't crash sporadically if much at all.
This is all very speculative, I know, but this is Slashdot. I believe I read something not long ago about DBMS that ran solely in memory and realized very nice performance.
Simply because NIST and Europe don't want to confuse the prefixes they are using for other things (like the metric system that has no relevance to computers, tough europeans) doesn't mean the world should adapt to an inconsistant system.
I for one prefer that the computing world use a consistant system and simply ignore European confusion with metric prefixes. After all, they really aren't relevant here in the US were almost every element of modern computing was invented.
How about we get rid of all the marketing systems and go back to good old base 2 for ALL data measurements. Stop calling it 10/100 ethernet when it tops out at 11.9mb/s
I think one of the key problems here isn't necessarily the statistical methods used, it is that the CMU team was comparing real-life drive performance to the "ideal" performance levels predicted by the drive manufacturers. Allow me to provide two examples of this "apples to oranges" comparison problem.
I have had two computers with power supply units that were "acting up." They ended up killing my hard drives on multiple occasions - Seagates, WD's, Maxtors, etc. It didn't matter what type of drive you put in these systems, the drive would die after anywhere from a week to two years. I later discovered that the power supplies were the problems, replaced them with brand new ones, and replaced the drives one last time. That was quite some time ago (years), and those drives, although small, still work, and have been transferred into newer computer systems since that time. The PSU was killing the drives; they weren't inherently bad or had a manufacturing defect. A friend of mine who lives in an apartment building constructed circa 1930 experienced similar problems with his drives. After just a few months, it seemed like his drives would spontaneously fail. When I tested his grounding plug, I found that it was carrying a voltage of about 30V (a hot ground - how wonderful). Since he moved out of that building and replaced his computer's PSU, no drive failures.
The same type of thing is true in automobile mileage testing. Car manufacturers must subject their cars to tests based on rules and procedures dictated by state and federal government agencies. These tests are almost never real world - driving on hilly terrain, through winds, with the headlights and window wipers on, plus the AC for defrost. They're based on a certain protocol developed in a laboratory to level the playing field and ensure that the ratings, for the most part, are similar. It simply means when you buy a new car, you can expect that under ideal conditions and at the beginning of the vehicle's life, it should BE ABLE to get the gas mileage listed on the window (based on an average sampling of the performance of many vehicles).
My point is that there really isn't a decent way to go about ensuring that an estimated statistic is valid for individual situations. By modifying the environmental conditions, the "rules of the game" change. A data-center with exceptional environmental control and voltage regulation systems, and top-quality server components (PSU's, voltage regulators, etc.) should expect to experience fewer drive failures per year than the drives found in an old chicken-shack data center set up in some hillbilly's back yard out in the middle of nowhere where quality is the last thing on the IT team's mind. It's impractical to expect that EVERY data center will be ideal - and since it's very very difficult to have better than the "ideal" testing conditions used in the MTTF tests - the real-life performance can only move towards more frequent and early failures. Using the car example above, since almost nobody is going to be using their vehicle in conditions BETTER than the ideal dictated by the protocols set forth by the government, and almost EVERYONE will be using their vehicles under worse conditions, the population average and median have nowhere to go but down. That doesn't mean the number is wrong, it just means that it's what the vehicle is capable of - but almost never demonstrates in terms of its performance - since ideal conditions in the real world are SO rare.
Manufacturers should be compelled to update published MTBF specifications (and similar metrics) over time based on actual data (e.g. how many units have been [i]sold[/i] (not just shipped), how many have been returned or reported dead, and how long the diagnostic data on the drive reports it was actually working. DOA drives could be excluded.
How so? A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes. A gibibyte is 1024 megabytes. And there is no such thing as a "gibabyte."
... and then they built the supercollider.
What? Software writers coined the greek language? I'm sorry, those greek prefixes have been around for a lot longer than 40 years.
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 alreadyBut it's obviously not perfectly workable, otherwise this confusion would never come up. And why would it be so hard for software to give me an option? It's my data - if I want it correctly labeled as Gibibytes, instead of incorrectly labeled - why don't I have that option? You can't change the size of a HD after it's made, but you can change how data is displayed in file lists. So, what's the problem?
... and then they built the supercollider.
It's perfectly fine to use base 2 - just use a different label don't incorrectly use language. "Mega" means 1,000, not 1024. It does not mean "around 1000." So, why did some idiot decide to use "Mega" to denote 1024?
I'm sick of technical and industry types ruining language for everybody. They've done enough damage with jargon and three-letter-abbreviations, why do they have to fuck with scientific language too?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Duh. I mean "kilo" means 1000, of course.
... and then they built the supercollider.
What? Software writers coined the greek language?
No, we coined the terms kilobyte and megabyte.
But it's obviously not perfectly workable, otherwise this confusion would never come up.
There's no confusion, only some deception by HD manufacturers.
nd why would it be so hard for software to give me an option? It's my data - if I want it correctly labeled as Gibibytes, instead of incorrectly labeled - why don't I have that option?
Because the correct label is Gigabyte, which is 2^30 bytes. If you care so much, write a patch.
So, what's the problem?
We don't want to change something that works just fine because some people who only tangentially get involved with what we do every day decided they want to redefine our jargon.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Truthfully I couldn't agree more. But the fact is that this particular screwing with the language was done decades ago and the damage is done. Attempting to change it now will only make things worse.
'They've done enough damage with jargon and three-letter-abbreviations, why do they have to fuck with scientific language too?'
Last I checked the metric system had nothing to do with science. It is simply another arbitrary measurement system that happens to be a little easier to work with when using base 10.
Two jobs ago I was a sysadmin at a place that had an EMC Clariion and Symetrix SANs. Both SANs had the ability to call home to EMC when they detected a drive failure and EMC would send out a replacement drive automatically.
We saw FedEX overnight boxes sitting on our doorstep in the morning with disturbing regularity. The "quality" of the systems did not seem to matter. A $30,000 SAN using SATA drives or a $500,000 SAN using FC drives...both had almost equal failure rates.
The FC SAN had WAY better performance....probably due to the 32 GB of system cache.
-ted
We have several large computing labs in our building. We run mostly IDE or SATA drives depending age of the hardware in them. Now, in their defense, we've been undergoing constant construction which means huge power fluctuations all day long and a big surge at night when all the construction equipment is shut off. The labs on are not on UPS's because it just isn't feasable. In some of the labs during the past year, we've seen hard drive failure rates as high as 25%. Brand doesn't seem to matter, neither does size, RPM's, etc. Fortunately, these are lab machines and it's pretty easy to bring one back up. Take the spare hard drive, apply ghost image, install. Send dead hard drive back for warranty. Put new drive on shelf as spare. Rinse and repeat. Still, it's a lot of time to replace all those.
2 cents.
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
Language is arbitrary. But it works a lot better when it's consistent. Some computer geek made a mistake some years ago, and used the wrong label. Why not just admit this mistake, change it, and move on? Science and human endeavor should be about improving ourselves, not getting stuck in old habits. A long time ago, somebody proclaimed that the sun revolves around the earth. Should we just stick to this incorrectness, just because it happened before we knew that it is not true? Somehow, the rest of the world manages to evolve and move on, yet computer geeks want to cling to incorrectness out of habit - even though the history of computers is like the blink of an eye compared to other fields of knowledge. Humans have gotten over much larger misconceptions, so why is it so difficult to get over something so trivial as this?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Which contain the greek prefixes. So, they were coined in error.
There's no confusion, only some deception by HD manufacturers.How can they be being deceptive when they are using accurate terms? And are network interface manufacturers being deceptive? Streaming video providers being deceptive?
Because the correct label is Gigabyte, which is 2^30 bytes.No, it's not. You are using the label incorrectly, and not using standards.
We don't want to change something that works just fine because some people who only tangentially get involved with what we do every day decided they want to redefine our jargon.But it doesn't work just fine. If it did, why does this argument even exist? How can it possibly work "just fine" when it is completely out of sync with every other field on the planet, and every other usage of these prefixes? And what do you mean "tangentially involved"? Who are "we"? I work with data every day, it's not tangential at all. What gives you authority over this?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'd have to disagree. Decades is nothing. Computer technology is still in its infancy. What better time to break this bad habit than now, just before computing gets really widespread?
See my other reply for more of this argument, but we've held other misconceptions for centuries, even millenia - yet we are able to change those. Why should it be so hard to whack this silly bit of trivia on the head, when we are so early in the game?
... and then they built the supercollider.
According to this NetApp reply to an open letter on storagemojo while the electronics of the drive beyond the interface may be the same on consumer and enterprise drives, the way the firmware behaves is not. The consumer drive firmware apparently do all it can to try and read data back even if it makes the drive temporarily unavailable and trusts additional information less that enterprise firmware.
Why are you so afraid of change? It's only two letters in a label! Why are you so attached to it? That doesn't seem like a very geeky or rational approach - what ever happened to looking to the future and improving things?
Also, you use "we" and "our" a lot. You say that "we" coined the term. Are you saying that you personally had something to do with coining these terms? I find that hard to believe. Who "owns" them? Again, we get back to the greek problem. Surely, "they" own their language, and you shouldn't be abusing it. Why don't you come up with your own damn alphabet and language? Huh?
... and then they built the supercollider.
If (for example) the reallocated sector count is high I don't think it's a matter of if but when your drive will fail. A count of 1 doesn't guarantee failure but indicates a higher probability than usual of imminent failure. From page 7 of the PDF:
I like dupes on Slashdot -- I sometimes go entire days without checking the site and it's nice to get another chance to participate in a discussion I may have missed out on. And when I do see the same story twice, oh well. Sometimes I ignore the second one, sometimes I read the discussion to see how it might have evolved from the first one.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
'Computer technology is still in its infancy. What better time to break this bad habit than now, just before computing gets really widespread?'
I don't know how it is elsewhere in the world. But here in the US there is a computer in pretty much every home. They are about as common as screwdrivers and hammers. I don't know how much more widespread you could get than that.
'Why should it be so hard to whack this silly bit of trivia on the head, when we are so early in the game?'
Marketing. The moment you create a different label for the proper base 2 units that are actually required for computing you have just vindicated the marketing droids. The marketing droids will continue to the terms just as they always have (incorrectly) because you have just made it correct for them to do so. The public will never be aware that any change was made at all and will continue to mistake a base 2 megabyte for a marketing megabyte.
The only way to make this change happen appropriately would be to require labels on all computer merchandise that use base 2 units much like we do for food.
> The study also shows no evidence that Fibre Channel drives are any more reliable than SATA drives
Why would one think this to begin with? The core mechanisms are probably the same thing, just wrapped with a new I/O mechanism.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Source: Google, (2007). Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Section 3.2, paragraph 1. http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
Why are you so afraid of change?
Why fetishize change? I like how things are, and there's no compelling reason to change.
It's only two letters in a label! Why are you so attached to it?
Largely because I'm used to kilo and kibi, mebi, gibi sound retarded. It's never come up in any job I've held, and the only people I've heard advocate it live on slashdot.
Also, you use "we" and "our" a lot. You say that "we" coined the term. Are you saying that you personally had something to do with coining these terms?
I identify with my profession. What are you on about?
Who "owns" them? Again, we get back to the greek problem.
The SI units are adapted from both greek and latin. In greek, they didn't mean 10^n, they were various words for 'big' and fifth or sixth. They also don't count for information conten. Mega is 10^6 or 2^20 depending on context.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Which contain the greek prefixes. So, they were coined in error.
No, they are used differently. Bytes are not part of SI, so we get to do what makes sense for what we do.
How can they be being deceptive when they are using accurate terms?
They aren't being accurant. About 10-12 years back, western digital started using 10^9 to compute disk capacity so they could list a bigger number. They got sued for false advertising, so they (and everybody else) now have to declare that they're using the 10^9 number when they say Gigabyte. Marketing weasels do not set standards.
No, it's not. You are using the label incorrectly, and not using standards.
bytes are outside of SI and ISO-31 doesn't apply to information content, no I'm not because there's no standard. That gibi foolishness doesn't count because nobody cares about it.
If it did, why does this argument even exist? How can it possibly work "just fine" when it is completely out of sync with every other field on the planet, and every other usage of these prefixes?
We have different requirements, and a 5% difference for someone outside the field isn't a big deal. We won't change what we're doing because computers are base 2, not 10, so accomodations must be made.
And what do you mean "tangentially involved"?
A bunch of standards bodies have adopted this new notation in the face of a lack of controversy.
What gives you authority over this?
There is no authority - standards bodies have none unless it is given to them by the people who they purport to standardize. I am merely noting that most of us in the field use mega and giga, while the mebi, gibi faction is small and anemic. What gives you authority over this?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
But they are very primitive, and not used anywhere near their potential. many of the computers go almost unused. How much more widespread could they get? Well, a computer in everyone's pocket for a start. And also us making more effective use of them.
The marketing droids will continue to the terms just as they always have (incorrectly) because you have just made it correct for them to do so. The public will never be aware that any change was made at all and will continue to mistake a base 2 megabyte for a marketing megabyte.I'm not seeing it. The current situation is much more vulnerable to marketing manipulation. If the terms were not so often interchanged, then an informed consumer could easily know what they are getting.
In any case, I don't see any evidence of this conspiracy by HD manufacturers that people keep whining about. On every company website that I've seen, they actually define "Gigabyte" (correctly) in the small print. This is something that I don't see very often in software or OSes, which freely use the term incorrectly, but don't disclose their definition.
The deception thus should lie on the software side - for example, is a software maker deceiving you, when they say that their application uses 256MB of RAM, when it is really consuming 256MiB of RAM? I'm not sure why everyone blames the HD manufacturers, but software gets off scott-free with their misrepresentations.
The only way to make this change happen appropriately would be to require labels on all computer merchandise that use base 2 units much like we do for food.Couldn't we just encourage programmers and other people in the industry to use those terms correctly? For example, if my OS listed Mebibytes correctly, then people would become aware of it. Eventually, companies who did not use the standards would be questioned, and market/peer pressure would prevail.
The problem is that, as you can see on slashdot, programmers and others are so addicted to their labeling out of habit, that they want to either ignore the problem, or shout down anyone who proposes a standard. Although this label might be a minor issue in the scale of things - the attitude behind this really reveals the primitiveness of the industry as I alluded to above. Such unprofessional attitudes are widespread, and it makes computer people seem very immature compared to other sciences and fields of engineering - where the practitioners are much more willing to debate more rationally, and change their ways.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'm not. I'm arguing for consistency, and change when something isn't working well.
I like how things are, and there's no compelling reason to change.Except there is a compelling reason to change. You just want to ignore it because of the sound of a word.
Largely because I'm used to kilo and kibi, mebi, gibi sound retarded.That's just about the lamest argument ever. If you don't like the sound of it, then why didn't you think about that when "you" incorrectly used "Mega" and "Giga" to avoid this problem? But if you don't like the sound of "Mebi" - then just switch to "Mega" and use it correctly. But seriously. There are plenty of lame-sounding terms. Are these any lamer than "Kelvin" or "meter"? It's just because you aren't used to them.
I identify with my profession. What are you on about?But not everybody in your profession agrees with this usage. What makes you think that all programmers agree with you? What am I on about? You claimed that "we" invented the term. So, did you, or did you not have anything to do with coining the term? If you didn't, you can't claim you were a part of the decision. Just being a programmer doesn't give you credit for that coinage, any more than you being a programmer means you were a part of inventing the Turing test.
Mega is 10^6 or 2^20 depending on context.Which is why it is so retarded. It means 10^6 everywhere - except for this one "special" area. Where everything has to be different. Why? If you want computer science and engineering to be taken more seriously, and rise past the level of psychology, you should start acting more like the real scientists and engineers. Do you want to be stuck at the kid's table, or on the "special bus" where we have to make special exceptions for little Johnny IT (psst - he's a bit slow), or do you want to come to the big table?
... and then they built the supercollider.
So what? Mega and Giga are a part of SI, and a part of a consistent language beyond that. Just because "byte" was coined by programmers/computer science - doesn't mean it's appropriate to modify the prefixes.
Megabyte - is literally "Million Bytes"
The size of a byte, and its basis in binary math has nothing to do with it.
western digital started using 10^9 to compute disk capacity so they could list a bigger number. They got sued for false advertising, so they (and everybody else) now have to declare that they're using the 10^9 number when they say Gigabyte. Marketing weasels do not set standards.That's just dumb. They got sued for using a term literally? It would have been more appropriate to sue software manufacturers for saying "this software requires 256MB of disk space" - when in actual fact it uses more. Remember, Mega=10^6.
Doesn't this debacle show how stupid people were for abusing the prefixes in the terminology? It was never formally defined as a standard, it was just a casual (mis)use of language. Western Digital is hardly to blame for that ambiguity, and that lawsuit should have been dismissed as baseless.
You claim there is no problem - but then you clearly demonstrate that there is a big problem - a company can get sued for using language more consistently. That's not good.
We won't change what we're doing because computers are base 2, not 10, so accomodations must be made.Again, the arrogance and immaturity of the industry goes on show. You won't change because you're egotistical. In reality, the programmer works for the user. The user is more important than the programmer. (excluding of course, programs made by the programmer for him/herself)
Just because you program in base 2 has no relevance to the end user, who is most likely NOT using a base two number system. Shit, why even display decimal values at all? If you love binary so much, why doesn't your file browser list filesizes in binary? Why even use "mega" which is base ten? Why not just display all values as a direct binary value?
I am merely noting that most of us in the field use mega and giga, while the mebi, gibi faction is small and anemic.That's because of attitudes like yours. Having the majority of an industry being wrong isn't exactly a good thing. It threatens the credibility of the industry. And there's nothing to stop you from continuing to use "mega" - just use it correctly. Most people use a decimal number system. And the binary system only really comes into play when doing low-level functions right up against the silicon. The majority of our use is in the higher layers.
What gives you authority over this?None. Just like you have none. But metric and ISO standards are pretty much where it's at. It would be good for the industry to get involved in that, rather than being a ghetto.
... and then they built the supercollider.
But if you don't like the sound of "Mebi" - then just switch to "Mega" and use it correctly.
I am. Megabyte si 2^20 bytes. Bytes are not SI units.
But not everybody in your profession agrees with this usage.
I don't see a groundswell of support for your position.
So, did you, or did you not have anything to do with coining the term?
We as in my profession. Are you not quite right in the head?
If you want computer science and engineering to be taken more seriously, and rise past the level of psychology, you should start acting more like the real scientists and engineers.
That's rich - we aren't taken seriously because we don't use SI units. What are you typing on, again?
Do you want to be stuck at the kid's table, or on the "special bus" where we have to make special exceptions for little Johnny IT (psst - he's a bit slow), or do you want to come to the big table?
I am at the big table. When you grow up, you can be there too.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Megabyte - is literally "Million Bytes"
No, literally, it is 'monster byte'. Mega is only a million in the context of SI. Bytes are not SI.
They got sued for using a term literally?
They got sued for using a term differently from the common usage in order to deceive the buying public.
Doesn't this debacle show how stupid people were for abusing the prefixes in the terminology?
No, not really.
It was never formally defined as a standard, it was just a casual (mis)use of language
Look up 'de facto' and get back to me.
You won't change because you're egotistical.
No, because it works just fine.
The user is more important than the programmer.
Not so. Users are more easily replaced. If you want to let the users define technical jargon, then pleaase refer to your computer as the hard drive and prefix every program's name with 'microsoft', even when someone else makes it. Face it, most users have no concept of size - what does 200M mean? Is that too big to send over email?
That's because of attitudes like yours.
Yeah, we like our terms as they are, so the mebi contingent is minor. That's what you call a tautology.
Having the majority of an industry being wrong isn't exactly a good thing.
Use defines meaning. The majority of the industry says megabyte = 2^20 bytesm thus it is so.
But metric and ISO standards are pretty much where it's at. I
Only to the extent that we allow it. Since the use of Mega is already well established, you have sod all chance of changing things.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"