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."

it's relative.

[User 956]

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.

Re:it's relative.

[bigtangringo]

Or what percentage of the speed of light they were traveling.

And that's a really wide range

[VampireByte]

I feel sorry for anyone buying drives on the low end of that range. A MTTF of 1 hour really sucks.

Re:Repeat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read so much from the firehose these days, I can't tell a dupe from the scoop anymore. I guess I need a new tag - dejavu.

Redundancy

[pizza_milkshake]

I thought storage-related redundancy was supposed to be a good thing ;)

Re:Redundancy

[georgewilliamherbert]

Redundant Array of Irritating Discussions?

No way

[Tablizer]

High rate of failure? That's a bunch of

Re:Seagate

[CelticWhisper]

Well, duh. Why do you think they used to call them Fireballs?

Re:Personally I am SHOCKED

[binarybum]

yeah, I used to think they were dirty bastards, but they just work on a different scale than the rest of us.
    The trick is to purchase your HD in pennies.

  "100,000 pennies! why that's 1024 dollars!!"

Re:Repeat?

[Detritus]

There's also a non-zero probability that all of the air molecules in a room will rush to the corner of the room, suffocating the occupants.

Re:Repeat?

[Baddas]

Just think what a fantastic way to die that would be. You'd get all kinds of notoriety.

Re:Personally I am SHOCKED

[Ryan Mallon]

Why do you think FORTRAN is one of the oldest computing languages in existence?

Because it was invented before most other computer languages? Is this a trick question ;-)

Re:Even better ...

[vux984]

Alrighty then... I'll just replace them before I install them ;)