Google labs' disk survey

[unhappy_mage]

Google Labs has released a fairly detailed survey of what causes their disks to fail. Interestingly, they mention that only about half of their failures are predicted by SMART:

Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count. In other words, models based only on those signals can never predict more than half of the failed drives.

Comments? I think I'll still spend money on cooling my drives, despite their findings - earlier studies have found a pretty severe correlation between temperature and failure.

 

[oplin]

Did they mention what was considered a little hot vs cool? Be nice if they posted exact temps. My hard drives run at 30-32c which seems like it might be in the cool range.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Take a look at page 6; they break drive temperatures into 5 categories.

 

[drizzt81]

just FYI:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1159460

 

[unhappy_mage]

Oops I guess that's what I get for not searching first.