Digital Home Thoughts: Google Releases Hard Drive Failure Study

"When your server farm is in the hundreds of thousands and you're using cheap, off-the-shelf hard drives as your primary means of storage, you've probably got a a pretty damned good data set for looking at the health and failure patterns of hard drives. Google studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA drives with between 80 and 400GB storage and 5400 to 7200rpm, and while unfortunately they didn't call out specific brands or models that had high failure rates, they did find a few interesting patterns in failing hard drives. One of those we thought was most intriguing was that drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn't or couldn't determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags (and that's interesting, of course, because SMART exists solely to survey hard drive health); other notable 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 (i.e. heavy data "grinding" is not a significant factor in failure)..."

Engadget has posted a short summary of the PDF that Google released - sadly, they didn't seem to include the one piece of information that most of us would want to know: with a test base of 100,000 hard drives, which brands and models were the most prone to failure? Regardless, there's still some useful bits of information, mostly myth-busters like the fact that a hard drive that runs warm will last longer than a hard drive that's aggressively cooled.