Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong

Here is another paper about failure of disk drives - and this one won the best paper award.

StorageMajo has a good summary. Robin Harris's conclusion is

After these two papers neither disk drive or array businesses will ever be the same. Storage is very conservative, so don’t expect overnight change, but these papers will accelerate the consumerization of large-scale storage. High-end drives still have advantages, but those fictive MTBFs aren’t one of them anymore.

Further, these results validate the Google File System’s central redundancy concept: forget RAID, just replicate the data three times. If I’m an IT architect, the idea that I can spend less money and get higher reliability from simple cluster storage file replication should be very attractive. [my emphasis]

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

google's engineers are presenting a study of disk drive failure at a conference and the 13-page paper is online. If you don't want to read the whole report, TG Daily has a fairly good summary.

The most interesting observation is:

temperature and high usage alone are not responsible for failures by default. Also, the researcher pointed towards a trend they call "infant mortality phase" - a time frame early in a hard drive's life that shows increased probabilities of failure under certain circumstances.