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How long do disk drives last?

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Re: How long do disk drives last?

#71

Post by marcosdumay »

toyg wrote: post #50

If some of them live a long, long time, it makes it hard to compute the average. Also, a few outliers can throw off the average and make it less useful. Proper statistical analysis would help you there.

> Proper statistical analysis would help you there.

Yes, if you know the probability distribution. If you don't know the distribution, you can not calculate your confidence, and thus can not do a proper statistical analysis.

And, guess what, nobody knows the probability distribution of hard drive failures. That's exactly what they are trying to find out.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#72

Post by mattlutze »

skriticos2 wrote: post #46
alfor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could not believe the price they have to pay for computer. It is easily 3x, 4x the price we pay for the same hardware. And I they do need computer. But, it is possible that the logistic/shipping is more expensive than the production of new hardware. Also, cheaper more energy efficient hardware could be more cost effective. source: A friend of mine worked for ong in Burkina Faso

I do believe you. It's economics of scale: they don't have it. While most of the western world has huge fright ship docks that can load/unload and ship relatively price efficient, Africa does not. This means, the primary means to ship stuff there is via airplane, which is notoriously weight constrained, which in turn makes shipping bulk goods expensive. This makes shipping newer, lighter tech even more cost effective…

I'd be curious to hear more about your history in international shipping, particularly to countries in Africa.

Many countries on the continent appear to have rather robust capacity for their economies.

http://ports.com/browse/africa/map-view/

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#73

Post by JoeAltmaier »

caw wrote: post #44
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also some combinations of devices can create problems. We had a RAID controller that randomly rebuild mirrored sets because the drive was 'dead'. After the rebuild the drive seemed fine. We concluded there was some firmware delay that caused the controller to time out some operation and call the drive 'failed'. We replaced the drives with a different brand and the 'failures' went away.

> We concluded there was some firmware delay that caused the controller to time out some operation and call the drive 'failed'. There is indeed a firmware setting on how long the drive spends checking for errors after it detects one, during which the drive doesn't respond. Sometimes this is too long for the RAID controller, so it drops it. It used to be you could buy WD Caviar Black drives and tweak that timeout sett…

Ha! Yes they were WD drives we replaced.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#75

Post by leeoniya »

xeroxmalf wrote: post #45
velodrome wrote: post #34

The hard disk drive quality has dropped over the last few years. * Most consumer drives over 2TB have extremely poor reliability. Just check any Amazon or Newegg review (DOA and early mortality show up with more frequency). Yes, I know using reviews are not accurate but since there is no public information of drive failure rates there is not really much to go on. * The reduction of manufacturer warranty since Thailan…

The RED drives you are refering to actually have some of the worst reviews around compared to even normal consumer drives. (Source: newegg reviews you mentioned)

i'm not sure where you're getting that info:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236...

http://www.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B008JJLZ7G

been running 3x of these in a raid-5 NAS, no issues so far (not that it's any kind of indicator on a system which idles as a backup all day)

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#77

Post by rdc12 »

mikevm wrote: post #66
jws wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greens have had problems with aggressive head parking. If you have an idle set of them you can go through their design limit of head parks in a couple of months and start to get failures shortly after. Done that. Check your S.M.A.R.T data. Look at the head park number. (Load cycles I think it is called, can't look it up now). If it is a six digit number, you are in trouble. For a server you want if to be in the same…

This might be anecdotal but external WD (MyLife) drives are usually from the Green series and I had 2 different ones fail on me after about 1 year of use. Same happened to 2 friends of mine. I blamed it on the constant head parking (it went idle after 10 minutes of unuse).

I have 4 WD greens, one from an external enclosure the others being internal drivers, the first being maybe 3 years old now, all still going fine, also anecdotal

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#78

Post by wazoox »

pyGuru wrote: post #39

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what the savings would amount to if this company used something like SpinRite to fix / recover failed drives? Although I've never used it from what I hear its pretty good at saving drives...

It's actually not that good at saving drives, however it sometimes saves your data. Lately I've used it to recover a 250 GB drive that was part of a failed RAID-5 array, and miraculously got the data back.

So SpinRite may be handy, but throw the drive away after use.

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#79

Post by jlgaddis »

pyGuru wrote: post #39

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what the savings would amount to if this company used something like SpinRite to fix / recover failed drives? Although I've never used it from what I hear its pretty good at saving drives...

http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/steve_gibson/

Re: How long do disk drives last?

#80

Post by rsync »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #67

Sysadmin here. My experience: 1. Infant mortality. Drives fail after a couple months of use. 2. 3 year mark. This is where fails begin for typical work loads. 3. 4-6 year mark. This is when you can expect the drives that haven't failed earlier to fail. By this point, we're looking at 33% fail. Interesting that my experiences roughly match up with Chart 1. My experiences are 10 to 15k SAS drives. Slower moving 7200rpm…

Agreed RE: SSD drives ...

It is very disappointing how flaky and unreliable SSD devices have been when their promise was just the opposite, due to lack of moving parts.

Back in 1999/2000 I had a habit of building some personal as well as commercial servers in datacenters with compact flash parts (plain old consumer CF drives) as boot devices with the goal of fault tolerance in mind. There was a price to be paid in that these devices needed to be mounted, and run, read-only.

But they ran forever. I never had one part fail. Just plain old CF drives mated directly to the IDE interface.

Now fast forward to 2013 and new servers we deploy for rsync.net have a boot mirror made of two SSDs ... things have gone well, but our general experience and anecdotal evidence from other parties gives us pause.

One thought: an SSD mirror, if it fails from some weird device bug or strange "wear" pattern would fail entirely, since both members of the mirror are getting the exact same treatment. For that reason, when we build SSD boot mirrors, we do so with two different parts - either one current gen and one previous gen intel part, or one intel part and one samsung part. That way if there is some strange behavior or defect or wearing issue, they both won't experience it.

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