Disk Drive Failures Worse Than You Realize ...

Speaking of Carnegie Mellon --

"A Carnegie Mellon University study indicates that customers are replacing disk drives more frequently than vendor estimates of mean time to failure (MTTF) would require. The study examined large production systems, including high-performance computing sites and Internet services sites running SCSI, FC and SATA drives. The data sheets for the drives indicated MTTF between 1 and 1.5 million hours. That should mean annual failure rates of 0.88%, annual replacement rates were between 2% and 4%. The study also shows no evidence that Fibre Channel drives are any more reliable than SATA drives."

What does this mean the ATHEN membership --- back up , Back Up!, BACK UP!!. Not only that -- but invest in the best that your dollar can buy. The higher the quality, the better the survival rate. How much do we rely upon internal and external disck drives for E-Text production, DNS voice files, server based AT, student files, and more? Think about it.

The study (presented at 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies) does note that the spike in failure rates occurs early in drive life. If a drive does not fail withn the first 6-9 months of operation it is quite likely you will get a good 5+ years out of it - but there are no guarantees. Any drive older than 7 years is likely going to fail and just like anything else in life - you get what you pay for. the cheap drive your Dean makes you buy today may end up costing you much more in time, money and lost productivity in the nearer rather than later future.