Hard disk test 'surprises' Google

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6376021.stm
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

"The impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive failure may be overstated,
says a report by three Google engineers.
The report examined 100,000 commercial hard drives,
ranging from 80GB to 400GB in capacity, used at Google since 2001.

The firm uses "off-the-shelf" drives to store cached web pages and services.

...."

Eric Gisin wrote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6376021.stm
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

"The impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive
failure may be overstated, says a report by three Google engineers.
The report examined 100,000 commercial hard drives,
ranging from 80GB to 400GB in capacity, used at Google since 2001.

The pdf also makes it clear that thats an unusual result that is very
different to the other analyses it cited found. It isnt clear why there
is that dramatic difference with the google result being unique.

The firm uses "off-the-shelf" drives to store cached web pages and services.
..."

"Eric Gisin" wrote in message
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6376021.stm
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

"The impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive
failure may be overstated, says a report by three Google engineers.
The report examined 100,000 commercial hard drives,
ranging from 80GB to 400GB in capacity, used at Google since 2001.


The firm uses "off-the-shelf" drives

So they don't manufacture their own harddrives. What a disgrace.

to store cached web pages and services.

So what do they use for their database then.


..."

Btw, I found this far more interesting:

Q
We find that the group of drives with scan errors are 10 times more
likely to fail than the group with no errors," said the authors.

They added:
"After the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail
within 60 days than drives without scan errors."
EQ

Not that it actually means anything, but as far as sound
bites go it sounds very technical and worrying, doesn't it.