Werner Vogel, is the CTO of Amazon.com. As such, he is probably fanatically concerned about uptime, large systems, and reliability. He's so concerned about it, he has a entire
blog about it. So, when he starts talking about failure rates for hard ware, specifically
the reliability of harddrives, you sit up and take notice.
He highlights two studies (
Study 1,
Study 2), one of them from Google, on the failure rates of harddrives, and what makes hard drives likely to fail. The interesting conclusions? It has nothing to do with use, environment, or age. Although older drives seemed to last longer than new drives. Why? Well, the newer disks were less expensive. As is often the case, you get what you pay for. There was also a "strong correlation between manufacturer/model and failure rates."
As an IT person, and specifically a system admin, harddrive failure is one of those things that is pretty high on my list of things "I really don't want to happen...ever." Those reports will make some interesting food for though next time we go buy harddrives. I think I'll be leaning toward the "enterprise class" harddrives.
