Happy Hamster Beaverton Computer Repair Discusses Hard Drive Failure Rates
Friday, May 15th, 2009
Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,
Today I want to talk to all of you about a fantastic study Google did on hard drive failure rates. Google uses regular old consumer grade desktop hard drives in its worldwide data servers. The same hard drives you would find inside your computer today. They collected, over the course of their history, an enormous amount of data about under which conditions those hard drives fail, and how likely hard drives are to fail. It’s a heavily technical 13 page report, and if you have the time you can read it here:
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
But for those of you who just want to know the conclusions, here are the really interesting points of the article:
1) Hard drives fail a lot more often when young than we might like to think. Google found that 3% of all hard drives fail within 3 months. Scarier still? 7% of all hard drives fail within 1 year. This means you have a 1 in 14 chance of your hard drive failing within the first year. So, just because your computer is new does not mean you don’t have to back it up.
2) Hard drives frequently fail without any warning at all. This isn’t really news to me, but it’s nice to see statistics that confirm it. Google found that only 56% of the hard drives that failed showed warning signs of failure before they died. So there is a 44% chance you will have no warning at all before your hard drive goes, one day it works, the next day it poofs.
3) Use is not a factor in hard drive failure. Google found no corolation between how much a hard drive had been used, and when it failed. We often hear, “well, but I only use my hard drives on weekends for 15 minutes, so shouldn’t it last forever?” This proves that is not true. Hard drives decay with age, regardless of use.
4) Temperature is probably not a factor in hard drive failure. Google found no corolation between hard drive failure and drive temperature, but the study does acknowledge that the sample set is problematic, because google data centers are all temperature controlled. Previous studies have found a connection between temperature and drive failure, with too cold being more of a factor than too hot.
5) Google found the five year failure rate of hard drives to be 39% with a margin of error of about 9%. This means after five years, somewhere between 30% and 48% of all hard drives have failed. This tracks pretty closely to what we see here in the shop, where 4-6 year old computers often have dead hard drives.
So what does this mean for you all of you? A few things:
1) Youth or inexperience is no defense of not making backups. Even young hard drives, or hard drives that are infrequently used, fail at a suprisingly high rate.
2) As we always say in posts like these, make backups! Most fo you know that we reccomend Mozy:
http://www.mozy.com/?kbid=42743
Which is a daily on-line backup solution. Basically it uses your internet connection to backup your stuff to a server outside your house. This provides you with “What if the house burns down?” protection, as well as, “but I never remember to make backups!” protection.
So yeah, neat stuff from google there!
Thanks,
-Zac
