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Excerpt

What are the cost trade-offs of reducing server hard drive failures? What can be done to mitigate consequences to drive failures?

Table of Contents

See also

Can we reduce the chance of hard drives failing, and at what cost/ benefit?

...

Data from a company using over 40,000 hard drives

Excerpt:

High-Level Summary

With 40,000 hard drives, Backblaze knows a lot about the reliability of hard drives and shares the statistics: 

  • 78% of drives survive more than 4 years.
  • The median hard drive survives 6 years.
  • Drives have 3 distinct failure modes that follow a bathtub curve:
    • Early “Infant Mortality” Failure
    • Constant (Random) Failure
    • Wear Out Failure
  • As long as the temperature is within spec, reliability is not affected by heat.
  • HGST drives are generally reliable; Seagate and Western Digital hard drives’ reliability vary by model. (see above cited web page for graphic)