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25,000-Drive Study Gives Insight On How Long Hard Drives Actually Last
MrSeb writes with this excerpt, linking to several pretty graphs: "For more than 30 years, the realm of computing has been intrinsically linked to the humble hard drive. It has been a complex and sometimes torturous relationship, but there's no denying the huge role that hard drives have played in the growth and popularization of PCs, and more recently in the rapid expansion of online and cloud storage. Given our exceedingly heavy reliance on hard drives, it's very, very weird that one piece of vital information still eludes us: How long does a hard drive last? According to some new data, gathered from 25,000 hard drives that have been spinning for four years, it turns out that hard drives actually have a surprisingly low failure rate."
Yah, except for my Western Digital Green which failed 3 days after the warranty expired. And similar accounts on newegg...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
>> hard drives actually have a surprisingly low failure rate.
You call a 20% failure rate in 3 years LOW? My career rate is closer to 5% over 5 years - who keeps buying all those crappy hard drives?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/02/18/0420247/google-releases-paper-on-disk-reliability
Four years isn't long enough. Come back to us when you reach 6 or 8 years. The study looked at drives during the warranty period (WD drives have 5 year warranty).
Also the information they presented doesn't show that low of a failure rate.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf
"Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population", dated 2007.
99% of consumers have no backups and no raid, so 20% failure rate = 20% chance of losing EVERYTHING.
I call that an unacceptably high failure rate.
And note: I also have seen a 20% failure rate at home. Higher if I use the crap WD green drives.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This study was completely useless. WHAT BRAND WERE THEY?! Hitachis and Fujitsus have a higher failure rate by a factor of about ten than a top of the line Seagate drive.
Only my personal experience but as for "power cycling" . . . I follow one basic rule.
If you turn it off every night (when you go home from work) . . . it'll work fine, and last five years . . . then you're in the danger zone.
If you LEAVE IT ON for weeks at a time and NEVER turn it off . . . it'll work fine, and last five years . . . then you're in the danger zone.
What you NEVER want to do is . . . run it for a year (like at a factory plant) then turn it off for a week vacation. You're toast. (In my limited experience of 28 years) . . . if you turn it off that week . . . there is a 75% chance . . . it'll never turn on again.
I don't know if the "grease" settles, or the metal binds . . . I just know if its been on a year . . . don't turn it off for more than an hour or two if you want it to continue to work.
No, I don't remember your name. But the memory mapped screen on a TRS80 from 1977 is from 15360 to 16383 if that helps.
Run the test longer and show us the data for span of 10 years. Additionally, reveal the brands and models of the disks. Thanks.
I worked at an on-line service for several years way back in the late 90s and early 00s and this data is consistent with the data I collected then over perhaps an order of magnitude more units. While 25K drives may not be a lot in the scale of today's internet services it is more than enough to draw statistically valid conclusions, as opposed to that, oh, 1 drive in your desktop gaming system that failed 1 day after the warranty expired.
These are the same stupid fucks that use rubber bands around hard drives in their "SAN" storage.
Given that anything remotely serious is based on the premise that you can't trust your hard drives, is a strategy that makes your HDDs incrementally less trustworthy; but much cheaper, actually 'stupid'?
I wouldn't want to use BackBlaze's 'Pods' on a small scale; because part of their low cost is achieved by moving all the redundancy, fault tolerance, etc. into software (and, for a small shop, paying a bit more for fancy hardware that handles that, along with backups, is cheaper than having a software guru on hand); but on a large scale, making the amount of 'overhead' (ie. dollars worth of hardware purchased to support each disk) as low as possible, and just using software (with its high up-front cost; but zero cost to copy an arbitrary number of times) seems pretty reasonable.
Now, if their arrangement was so dodgy that it was actively murdering drives, that'd be another story; but its thermals and electrical supply are good enough that the drives inside get to fail, or not, the same as though they were in any other enclosure, and these enclosures are crazy cheap, so why not?
So it averages to 12.5 years, not too shabby for a HD.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I've actually had the most luck with refurbished drives. If you find a brand on Newegg that's fairly new, you eliminate the re-furbs that failed due to wear and tear. The ones that are left are DOA drives that got sent back because of common manufacturing flaws. These drives are 100% QC tested and I've yet to have one fail. The awesome kicker is that the stigma of a re-furb virtually guarantees that they'll be cheaper as well.
Common Sense (+1)
If you are sure that they were a relatively new model, and the refurb was a FACTORY refurb, that might be a good method. If Joe Stocking Clerk did the refurb, who knows what you will get.
When installing, and periodically there after, It is wise to run something like smartctl -a /dev/sd? on your drives and check the power on hours and power cycle count. (Not to mention the reallocated sector count and spin retry).
You would be surprised how many refurbs are actually fairly heavily used, with a lot of hours.
My current server's raid array is averaging 5.9 years, but has only seen 53 power cycles over that time. I actually tend to believe (without a great deal of evidence) that power cycles are harder on drives than running constantly.
Google actually did a similar study some years ago. Their study of over 100,000 drives largely agreed with the present study, right down to the three-node distribution of failures over time.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.