Everything You Know About Disk (Reliability) is Wrong

[Soopafresh]

100,000 Drives studied in the "real world" during their assumed 5 year lifespan.

http://storagemojo.com/?p=383

Notable Points of the Study:

Drive failure is much higher than MTBF stats - in some cases 13% likelihood of drive failure.

Raid 5 storage isn't necessarily safe, since there is a high likelihood of another drive or array failing soon after the first drive dies. (Oh boy, the times I've experienced this one. I've been vindicated !)

SATA is just as reliable as high end SCSI

As drives grow older, the failure rate increases significantly

[Wile_E]

This is already common knowledge for those of us working in the industry. I see drives fail occasionally but not so much that it becomes a pain to replace them. RAID 10 and 0+1 are more common place in the enterprise world than RAID 5. Even RAID 6 is becoming popular for larger arrays. Arrays of 15 or more disks are common. Several can go out at once and we still won't lose data. Most of our arrays span multiple enclosures for redundancy. Also 2.5" failure rate is much higher than 3.5" drives at this time. I believe age has little to do with drive failure. We have new drives that fail in one to two days, and old drives we've had for years. It just depends on the amount of traffic the drives get in their lifetime and just plain luck.

[redwudz]

I suppose another factor is that modern drives are made for the cheapest price possible. The competition forces that. Good for low prices, maybe not so good for quality. But the techniques of manufacture have improved along with the drop in price, likely the tolerances also. I suppose it balances out. Consider what you pay for a 100GB+ drive compared to what you would of only a few years ago.

But with all that, I haven't had a major drive failure in several years using probably 20 or more drives in different machines.

[Soopafresh]

Of course it is common knowledge for those of us in the trenches. Finally some concrete proof to wipe that "you're full of shite" smirk off the faces of upper management and business owners.