Hard Drive Failure Statistics at Google

August 9, 2007 at 8:40 pm 4 comments

Statistics about hard drives from Google’s data centers were published in USENIX, showing how different variables affect the failure rate of hard drives. AFR is “Annual Failure Rate”.

The older drives may be failing more simply because they are a less advanced batch.

Low, medium, and high specify the usage.

Surprisingly, 35-45 degrees C is the sweet spot for hard drives. Colder temperatures actually cause them to fail more.

SMART will catch about half of hard disk failures before the happen, but many drives will fail without any warning.

Pinheiro, E., Weber, W., & Barroso, L. (2007). Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Proceedings from FAST ’07: USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 5. [PDF]

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4 Comments Add your own

1. Codzienna kupa | May 22, 2009 at 5:02 am

I’ve never had any problems with hard drives. Well except for that one time when I accidentaly erased 40gb of data. But that was my fault.
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2. web design in miami | June 23, 2009 at 6:37 am

Oh man, this explains a lot. I’ve been doing some overclocking lately and for that, I had to exchange your regular radiators with something with a bit more punch. I might have overdone it, with all of this on the room temperature starts going down!
But at least now I know why my hd died. ..
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3. mimikmateusz | November 24, 2009 at 11:49 am

Thanks a lot for this information! it is very useful
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4. George Clooney | March 27, 2011 at 6:50 am

Interesting facts ;) thank’s for sharing.
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