[tahoe-dev] some papers on disk-drive reliability

[Brian Warner]

I just stumbled across a couple of interesting papers on how reliable 
disk drives are in the long term. We've kicked around the idea of 
spinning down redundant disks (to save power and maybe increase their 
lifetime).. it turns out this technique has a name: MAID (Massive Array 
of Idle Disks).

   http://www.lockss.org/locksswiki/files/ISandT2008.pdf
   http://www.bl.uk/ipres2008/presentations_day2/43_Rosenthal.pdf

The second paper gets into some of the quantitative analysis that we've 
also been kicking around, trying to find a useful metric with which to 
discuss the lifetime of a given piece of data.

Also interesting was the mention that 2.5" drives are more suitable to 
spindown-longevity than 3.5", because 2.5" drives use an off-platter 
parking area, while 3.5" drives park the heads on an otherwise-unused 
portion of the platter (so the heads still touch the platter, and 
corrosion eventually takes place at the point of contact).


cheers,
  -Brian