Google study on hard drive failures

[damage]

some folks at google did a study on hard drive failures from their server farms (sample size of over 100,000 drives installed since 2001). they actually found that drives that run cool tend to fail more often. guess i should cut down some of the airflow in my server!

http://216.239.37.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf

 

[Steve]

I think the study is flawed. I did not see them state anywhere that "Hard drives fail more in and around electron's house then anyplace else"

 

[electron]

Had another one fail this week

 

[IVB]

they had cause&effect backwards.

It's not that running your hard drives cooler keeps them running longer, it's that running hard drives longer makes it cold outside.

I don't have many hard drives (anymore) and it's warm near my house. Electron has tons of hard drives and, well, you know what happened to him

 

[TCassio]

Must be all the snow around his house causing the HD failures.

 

[huggy59]

I think he just overloads them and thrashes them to death with the emulation packages he runs... hehe

Or it could be the pails he keeps the PCs in... lol

But seriously, hard drives do "breath", and I think people forget that. They have a small filtered or semi-sealed hole in them somewhere on the case to allow at least pressure variations between outside and inside. The inside is, of course a very clean environment and needs to stay that way. If the breather hole is compromised, the drive will eventually die due to contamination.

I see a lot of cases that don't allow breathing (they cover the holes) and have terrible airflow around the drive, or even mount drives at positions that aren't really ideal. And then I also see a lot of PCs with too few mounting screws in them. Vibration is also a killer. Make sure they are mounted right.

Most of the drives I'vepurchased over the years last 3-5 years. I usually do a high-level (OS) reformat yearly, though.

Oh well, the drives are cheap enough - it's the data and downtime that isn't!