Google’s White Paper on Hard Drive Failure

Posted by Pete on Apr 2, 2009 in Hardware, Technology | 1 comment

Google is one of the largest buyers of hard drives today. Last year they released a white paper on hard drive failure with some surprising results. Among other things they found that temperature does not play such a large role as previously thought. In fact only after three years did hotter drives start to fail more often. Also they found that hard drives that reported errors were extremely likely to fail within 60 days.

“Our results confirm the findings of previous smaller population studies that suggest that some of the SMART parameters are well-correlated with higher failure probabilities. We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors.”

Read the whole report here (PDF)