Google published a study on disk failures. 

http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32774.html

They provide some interesting data on AFR as a function of disk age among other 
data




Deepak 

On Apr 19, 2013, at 2:50, Fred Youhanaie <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> 
> On 19/04/13 00:01, mathog wrote:
>> High end SATA and SAS disks claim MTBF values that work out to over 100
>> years, and yet it is a common
>> observation that certain models fail at rates entirely inconsistent
>> with those values.  For instance,
>> 75% of all drives of one model dead in < 6 years.  (Cited by one poster
>> in this thread:
>> 
>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.solaris/zQjoyc8T01Y
>> 
>> ).  Additionally, manufacturer warranties at best only go to 5 years,
>> which suggests the manufacturers
>> don't have a whole lot of faith in their MTBF values.
>> 
>> Some of you have huge amounts of storage, how many disk models lasted
>> as long as their MTBF suggests
>> they should?  (Personally we have only one set of disks that are still
>> consistent with the claimed MTBF,
>> a set of 6 Fibre Channel disks that came with a Sun server and are now
>> 10 years old - with no failures.)
> 
> You may find this paper helpful, some of the data sets used in their studies 
> come from large HPC sites:
> 
>    Bianca Schroeder, Garth A. Gibson
>    Understanding disk failure rates: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours 
> mean to you?
>    http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1288783.1288785
> 
> If you, or your institution, do not have access to the ACM publications, you 
> may be able to find a free copy posted by the authors, ACM does allow that :)
> 
>> How do they come up with the MTBF values for disks anyway?  Clearly it
>> is not based on watching a large
>> sample of disks for countless years!
> 
> I can't remember if I have read it in the above paper or elsewhere that users 
> in the field tend to replace disks on the first signs of failure, e.g. SCSI 
> warnings, while manufacturers' tests may run 
> to total failure, which leads to claims of longer MTTF/MTBF values by the 
> manufacturers.
> 
> Cheers
> Fred
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