Hard Drives - Why do they fail? - Google's findings

[jeffy]

http://tgdaily.com/2007/02/16/google_hard_drives/

Really interesting :confused:

EDIT (May 7th, 2008)
New link:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/30990/113/

[hoozdapimp]

This part really surprises me:


Google's temperature research found an equally surprising result: "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," the authors of the study found.

[bongoman31]

I just went through an interesting ordeal with a WD external hard-drive. Long story short, my drive wasn't being picked up by my computer, after working fine for a year or so- yeah, just beyond warranty. But I was more concerned with all my stuff on the drive. I searched the web and saw something about the enclosures are often what has gone bad, instead of the drive itself. Well, after finally extracting the drive from its enclosure, and getting it plugged in to the innards of my desktop, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my drive was fine and the problem was somewhere in the enclosure.

[jeffy]

http://dailytech.com/Study+Hard+Drive+MTBF+Ratings+Highly+Exaggerated/article6404.htm