25,000-Drive Study Gives Insight On How Long Hard Drives Actually Last 277
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."
Um.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yah, except for my Western Digital Green which failed 3 days after the warranty expired. And similar accounts on newegg...
20% is bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:20% failure rate in 3 years is LOW? (Score:4, Interesting)
Careful. These are consumer grade drives. In other words, they're meant for use by typical consumers, where the disk spends 99.9999% of its time track following and running in a relatively low power state. But the folks who are using them are using them as enterprise drives, running 24/7 in racks with other drives, in a hot environment. Something that is very different from what they were designed for. Heat is the enemy of disk drives.
Honestly, if you want enterprise drives buy enterprise drives. These folks don't (too cheap on the initial cost so they'd rather pay on the backend?), so they get higher failure rates than "normal" folks do for their drives. This is like buying a Cobalt and going off-roading with it -- it'll work, but not for long before something breaks because it wasn't designed to be used that way.
this is consistent with my data... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Re-furbs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google's own study was 4 times larger (Score:5, Interesting)
They are, actually. They're often custom made for the purpose - because when you think about it - what's the point of a high speed hard drive when USB is the limiting factor?
USB mass storage doesn't support more than one outstanding request at a time, so features like NCQ and all that are pointless. Large caches were pointless in a world of USB 2.0 and the data can be pulled from the media faster than the interface (has there been any USB 2.0 hard drive that gets more than 20MB/sec transfer? That's less than half the theoretical... and most mechanisms can pull 40+MB/sec off the inner tracks). Likewise, there's no point putting high speed drives in there - the latency and seek times are pretty much the same, so 7200RPM vs 5400? No big difference.
And of course, they're popular and cheap and unless you can put value-add on there, people pay little, so the goal to make them really cheap is paramount. Heck, the later original Xboxes had 8GB drives that were bare bones cheap - Seagate got rid of a ton of bearings and other stuff.
Heck, in some USB3.0 drives, especially those by WD and Seagate, they don't use SATA anymore - the drive electronics speak USB 3.0 natively with onboard controllers.