What Small Businesses Need to Know About Hard Disk Failure

WingSwept found that this study done by Google to be  informative and useful to those interested in hard disk failures. Google only released some of their results, but three major conclusions are below. To read an article about this study click here.

The Surprising Truth about Temperature!

Despite what most believe, high operating temperatures aren’t the worst things to happen to your system. Disk failures are more common in LOW temperature environments.

Tracking Performance

Google found that tracking four specific SMART counters (scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count) were clearly associated with subsequent hard disk failures. But, they also found that more than HALF of the failed drives in its sample of over 100,000 disk drives showed no problems in these four categories before failure occurred.

Does Age Matter?

This is one thing Google could not pin-point in their study. There seems to be a slightly higher failure rate during the first three months; disks that survive this burn-in period are then uniformly reliable for around a year.  The manufacturer of a three year-old drive has a bigger impact on reliability than the fact that the drive is three years old. Unfortunately, Google was unwilling to share WHICH manufacturers they found to be the most reliable.