Quote: The impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive failure may be overstated, says a report by three Google engineers. The report examined 100,000 commercial hard drives, ranging from 80GB to 400GB in capacity, used at Google since 2001. ... "Our data indicate a much weaker correlation between utilisation levels and failures than previous work has suggested," the authors noted. ... There is a widely held belief that hard disks which are subject to heavy use are more likely to fail than those used intermittently. It was also thought that hard drives preferred cool temperatures to hotter environments. The authors wrote: "We expected to notice a very strong and consistent correlation between high utilisation and higher failure rates. "However our results appear to paint a more complex picture. First, only very young and very old age groups appear to show the expected behaviour." ... The report was compiled by Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andre Barroso, and was presented to a storage conference in California last week. ... The report said that there was a clear trend showing "that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates". "Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend." But hard drives which are three years old and older were more likely to suffer a failure when used in warmer environments. "This is a surprising result, which could indicate that data centre or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment containing disk drives," said the authors. ...

Quote: The report said that there was a clear trend showing "that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates".

Quote: Original post by Moe
I just wish they would say what drives were the most reliable...

Quote:
... More than one hundred thousand disk drives were used for all the results presented here. The disks are a combination of serial and parallel ATA consumer-grade hard disk drives, ranging in speed from 5400 to 7200 rpm, and in size from 80 to 400 GB. All units in this study were put into production in or after 2001. The population contains several models from many of the largest disk drive manufacturers and from at least nine different models. The data used for this study were collected between December 2005 and August 2006.
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Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact.
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[18] Sandeep Shah and Jon G. Elerath. Disk drive vintage and its effect on reliability. In Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Reliability and Maintainability, pages 163 – 167, January 2004.
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