Disk Drive Pop

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

Appears in the Proceedings of the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST’07), February 2007

Eduardo Pinheiro,
Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz André Barroso Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy,
Mountain View,
CA 94043

Abstract

It is estimated that over 90% of all new information produced in theworld is being stored on magnetic media, most of it on hard diskdrives. Despite their importance, there is relatively little publishedwork on the failure patterns of disk drives, and the key factorsthat affect their lifetime. Most available data are either based onextrapolation from accelerated aging experiments or from relativelymodest sized field studies. Moreover, larger population studiesrarely have the infrastructure in place to collect health signals fromcomponents in operation, which is critical information for detailedfailure analysis.

We present data collected from detailed observations of a largedisk drive population in a production Internet services deployment.The population observed is many times larger than that of previousstudies. In addition to presenting failure statistics, we analyze thecorrelation between failures and several parameters generallybelieved to impact longevity.

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 Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population