[ale] Google paper for sysadmins

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Sun Feb 18 18:24:34 EST 2007


I'm sure everyone here reads /.  Some probably have it as their home
page in Firefox :)

The article about Google doing a serious study of hard drive failure is
a very well done bit of scientific analysis. For those on the group that
are professional sysadmins (and all others who like their hard drives) I
highly recommend the pdf:
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

The nutshell is: if the drive gives a scan error AT ALL - replace it
_now_ (failure is imminent within days). If it gives a seek error -
replace it ASAP (within days). If it is going to fail, it will fail
early in its life rather than later.  Old drives fail at about their
warranty expiration.(Duh!)

The SMART data only accounts for 48% of the drive failures. That is
distressing. Temperature is not a big factor if drive failure EXCEPT
(!!) low temp is more of a problem than high temp.
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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