Google Issues Paper On Hard Drive Failures

Feb 19, 2007 at 9:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has issued a paper on the reliability of certain types of hard drives named Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Engadget sums up the study via Slashdot saying the following:

Studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA drives with between 80 and 400GB storage and 5400 to 7200rpm
56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags
Patterns showed that failure rates are indeed definitely correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age
Failure rates did not correspond to drive usage except in very young and old drives
There is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected
Drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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2 COMMENTS ON Google Issues Paper On Hard Drive Failures

Scott Johnson, February 19th, 2007 at 11:08 am ET:

I can’t help but wonder which manufacturers faired the best in this study. Personally, Seagate drives have always held up the best for me, but I know others who are religiously attached to other brands.

rustybrick, February 19th, 2007 at 11:30 am ET:

I am with you Scott, I am wondering the same thing.

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