Hi, Most of our server drives our mirrored, so I wasn't really thinking about the failure of individual drives. I was thinking about a more serious failure which might take out the whole disk array or server.
The starting point then is "How often will a failure occur if we keep our kit new (ie three years)", then the next step is to try and categorize them and decide how much loss they will cause to the company. It's interesting that there aren't any independent statistics. I supoose that's because the cards etc are changed so often that any statistics are out of date by the time they are published. I wonder if the problem can be approached from the other end. I wonder if there is a design standard (ISO or such like) which states that a manufacturer should aim for an MTBF of whatever. I'll let you know if I find anything. Duncan -----Original Message----- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org]on Behalf Of Avleen Vig Sent: 06 June 2009 03:40 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: Hardware Reliability I don't have any written analysis for you, just 15+ years of experience. Most server hardware (cheap or expensive) will run 5 years without many issues, 10 years with some issues. By "issues" I mean the occasional bad disk, etc. IMO most drives which are going to die, do so within the first 12 months. After that they often last 3+ years, and 5+ years isn't unheard of. The biggest killer of old drives, is power cycling them. It requires bearings which have been in constant motion for years to suddenly stop abd then be exposed to sheer forces when starting up. If you are happy running older, slower, less efficient hardware, you can probably keep it longer than 3 years without a problem. On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:49 PM, <duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > Hi, > > Can somebody please point me in the direction of some authorative reliability statistics for server hardware, preferably including add-ons such as disc arrays? > > I case to put together a case for the number of failures we can expect if we replace our hardware every three years. > > Everybody has an opinion but I can't find any proper published data. > > Thanks > > Duncan >