<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Slightly OT<br>
<br>
One thing to add to those of you thinking of going RAID and is touched<br>
on in an earlier comment is that it's heat that kills drives. <br></blockquote></div><br>I do not mean to be contrarian but I would refer you to the study that Google did ([PDF] <a href="http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf">http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf</a>). It is a short document and you can glean the important points just by looking at the graphs. It uses the largest sample set of hard drives ever for such a study and It is one of the best resources for understanding what factors actually cause drive failures. From the report:<br>
<br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">The figure shows that failures do not increase when the average temperature increases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates. Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend.<br>
<br></div>They also found that average utilization doesn't correlate with drive failures unless the drive is very new (< 6 months) or very old (> 5 years). Another interesting tidbit is that only about half of the drives that failed had warnings from failed SMART tests. <br>
<div style="margin-left: 40px;"><br></div><br>