The report states that an estimated 90%+ of all new information produced in the world is being stored on magnetic media, most of it on hard disk drives. Despite their importance, the report says, there is relatively little published work on the failure patterns of disk drives, and the key factors that affect their lifetime.

While data on hard disk lifespans does exist, Google’s engineers found little of true relevance to go on, so they decided to do their own tests. The report says that “Most available data are either based on extrapolation from accelerated aging experiments or from relatively modest sized field studies. Moreover, larger population studies rarely have the infrastructure in place to collect health signals from components in operation, which is critical information for detailed failure analysis”.

In the report, the engineers present data collected from detailed observations of a large disk drive population in a production Internet services deployment, with the number of hard drives being many times larger than that of previous studies.

In addition to presenting failure statistics, they also analyzed the correlation between failures and several parameters generally believed to impact longevity.

The key findings of the 13 page report state that while their analysis identifies several parameters from the drive’s self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures, they concluded that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures.

In addition, another equally surprising discovery is that that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.

So, while all hard drives will ultimately fail, it’s good to know that modern technology has created ever better hard disk technologies while offering ever larger storage capacities. The need for a backup (or several) will never disappear, and your hard disk will ultimately fail no matter what you do.

But until then, it’s good to know that today’s hard drives really are… hardy!
{moscomment}

Tags See All Tags

Alex Zaharov-Reutt  Google  Hardware  Research  Supercomputing