[mythtv-users] OT: Seagate to reduce warranties on consumer drives to 3 years from 2009

Thomas Fjellstrom tfjellstrom at shaw.ca
Sat Dec 20 05:40:15 UTC 2008


On December 18, 2008, jarpublic at gmail.com wrote:
> > > Actually Google's study did say that failure rates were highly
> > > correlated with the model and manufacturer. Unfortunately for us, they
> > > didn't name
> >
> > any
> >
> > > specific manufacturers or models in their report. From the report:
> > >
> > > "Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive
> > > models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do
> > > not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes
> > > significantly when we normalize failure rates per each
> > > drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by
> > > drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a
> > > breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage
> > > due to the proprietary nature of these data."
> > >
> > > The interesting thing from the report was that higher temperatures and
> >
> > heavy
> >
> > > usage didn't seem to correlate with a higher failure rates regardless
> > > of manufacturer. The report is short and easy to read or just skim over
> > > if anybody wants to look more closely:
> > > http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf.
> >
> > hrmm, the report I read from them talked about failures being more
> > related to environment than manufacturer/model. I wonder if they since
> > updated their report?
> >
> > This is the report from a couple of years ago. It is the only one I
> > recall
>
> seeing. It always stuck out in my memory because it contradicted the common
> idea that higher temperatures and heavy usage were the main causes of drive
> failures. In that report I think they do say that there were other studies
> that seemed to indicate that temperature was a factor. However, no other
> study used nearly as many drives as Google, so it is generally seen as
> being more reliable data.

I think it said temperature was a factor, but cold more so than hot. 
Manufacturers have been engineering parts to work at ever higher temperatures 
for ever longer periods.

Just make sure you warm your drive up to room temperature after its delivered 
;)

If you wonder why, all the metal parts will heat up rather quickly, and the 
different parts will want to expand, some likely at different rates. I imagine 
if a drive is cold enough, plugging it in and turning it on could cause an 
instant catastrophic failure, likely a head crash, or possibly the spindle or 
arm will seize. Not to mention most chips aren't made to operate below 0-20c 
or so if they also have to work above 40c.

-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom at shaw.ca


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