[volunteergrid2-l] disk drive failure statistics

[Ted Rolle, Jr.]

How big is your sample, and it is large enough to obtain statistical
information?

I have a "whatever came with my desktop" drive.  If I buy a hard drive,
it'll probably be a Hitachi Deskstar drive --- good things said about it
on #Hardware.

Ted

On 04/06/2012 10:59 PM, erpo41 at gmail.com wrote:
> If this is too far off topic for the list, please let me know...
>
> Have you ever noticed that almost everyone seems to have an opinion on
> which disk drive manufacturers make the most or least reliable disks?
> Have you ever noticed that those people haven't owned a random sample
> of more than 1000 drives and haven't kept detailed statistics on which
> drives failed and when?
>
> In February of 2007, Google published a paper titled "Failure Trends
> in a Large Disk Drive Population"
> (http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf)
> analyzing the impact of various environmental factors and SMART
> readings on disk drive failure rates. This paragraph really caught my
> attention:
>
> "Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive
> models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do
> not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes
> significantly when we normalize failure rates per each
> drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by
> drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a
> breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage
> due to the proprietary nature of these data."
>
> I don't know about anyone else, but I want that data so I can choose
> the most reliable hard drives from the most reliable manufacturers.
> Furthermore, I want that data to be made public so hard drive
> manufacturers will face real pressure to improve reliability.
>
> I've thought about several schemes for collecting this data from PCs
> across the world, but that effort is complicated by the fact that most
> desktops are not on and connected to the Internet 24/7. If a PC is off
> when its disk fails, or if it's not connected to the Internet, it
> won't be able to report the failure ever.
>
> I think you see where I'm going with this. Tahoe-LAFS/VG2 may be the
> ideal way to collect this type of data. So, two questions:
>
> 1. Is there any reason why someone would object to having the tahoe
> client/server collect disk failure statistics and report them to a
> central server? Should this feature be opt-in or opt-out?
>
> 2. Does anyone see any potential for error in this scheme?
>
> Thanks,
> Eric
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