Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong

modapi writes "Google's wasn't the best storage paper at FAST '07. Another, more provocative paper looking at real-world results from 100,000 disk drives got the 'Best Paper' award. Bianca Schroeder, of CMU's Parallel Data Lab, submitted Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? The paper crushes a number of (what we now know to be) myths about disks such as vendor MTBF validity, 'consumer' vs. 'enterprise' drive reliability (spoiler: no difference), and RAID 5 assumptions. StorageMojo has a good summary of the paper's key points."

moving parts

[DogDude]

Every single mechanism with moving parts will fail. It's just a matter of when. In a few years, when everybody is using solid state drives, people will look back and shake their heads, wondering why we were using spinning magnetic platters to hold all of our critical data for such a long time.

"Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong"

[cookieinc]

Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong

Finally, a paper which disspells the common myth that disks are made of boiled candy.

Re:Dr. Schroeder is pretty hot, too!

[Anonymous Coward]

Except she requires a MTBF of more than 3 seconds. Sorry dude.

Re:Dr. Schroeder is pretty hot, too!

[gardyloo]

Except she requires a MTBF of more than 3 seconds. Sorry dude.

      You call that failure?!? I'd call it success.

Re:moving parts

[theReal-Hp_Sauce]

Forget Solid State Drives, soon we'll have Isolinear Chips. It wont matter if they fail or not because as long as the story line supports it Geordie can re-route the power through some other subsystem, Data can move the chips around really quickly, Picard can "make it so", and after it's all over with Wesley can wear a horrible sweater and deliver a really cheese line.

-C

Human MTBF

[EmbeddedJanitor]

MTBF of a human until gross catastophic failure (ie. death) is approx 50 years which is approx 440,000 hours.

Of course if we count relatively minor failures (like forgetting to take out the trash or pick up dirty underwear), then MTBF is approx 27 minutes!

Schroeder's disk...

[Anonymous Coward]

is neither working nor broken... Unless you look at it of course ;)

Re:"Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong"

[egr]

I've read the article, then the tittle, damn!

Re:i'll tell you

[DarkVader]

And could there be anything funnier that could happen to that comment than it being moderated "Redundant"?

Re:i'll tell you

[Anonymous Coward]

In a perfectly humorous world, everyone would mod it as Underrated, (except the original Redundant mod,) so that it makes it to +5 Redundant.

Oh, I wish I didn't waste my mod points on the Valentine survey.

Re:Nothing I knew about hard drives was mentioned

[AllParadox]

"temperature has no effect on the failure rate"

Said by people who do not know how to light off a cutting torch.

Trust me, I *can* make 'em fail.

Real quick, too.

Yes, Everything!

[DeeVeeAnt]

It turns out they are actually triangular

Re:moving parts - Don't always wear out

[leonardluen]

but what happens when we run out of cats to power them?

Re:moving parts

[Boglin]

I think you need to reread the article. It clearly states that consumer solutions are just as good as Enterprise one.