Understanding disk failure rates: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you

ACM Transactions on Storage

Volumn 3, Issue 3, 2007, Pages

  Schroeder, Bianca ^a,b   Gibson, Garth A ^a,b  

^a CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Carnegie Mellon University   (United States)

Author keywords

Annual failure rates; Annual replacement rates; Datasheet MTTF; Failure correlation; Hard drive failure; Hard drive replacements; Infant mortality; MTTF; Storage reliability; Time between failure; Wear out

Indexed keywords

ANNUAL FAILURE RATES; ANNUAL REPLACEMENT RATES; DATASHEET MTTF; FAILURE CORRELATION; HARD DRIVE REPLACEMENTS; INFANT MORTALITY; STORAGE RELIABILITY; TIME BETWEEN FAILURE; WEAR-OUT;

CLUSTER ANALYSIS; INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY; INTERNET; MAGNETIC DISK STORAGE; PROBLEM SOLVING; WEBSITES;

COMPUTER SYSTEM RECOVERY;

EID: 36049041275     PISSN: 15533077     EISSN: 15533093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1145/1288783.1288785     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. BAIRAVASUNDARAM, L. N., GOODSON, G. R., PASUPATHY, S., AND SCHINDLER, J. 2007. An analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS).
2. CFDR. 2007. The computer failure data repository, http://cfdr.usenix.org/ .
3. COLE, G. 2000. Estimating drive reliability in desktop computers and consumer electronics systems. TP-338.1. Seagate Technology, November.
4. CORBETT, P. F., ENGLISH, R., GOEL, A., GRCANAC, T, KLEIMAN, S., LEONG, J., AND SANKAR, S. 2004. Rowdiagonal parity for double disk failure correction. In Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST).
5. DRUMMER, D., KHURSHUDOV, A., RIEDEL, E., AND WATTS R. 2006. Personal communication.
6. ELERATH, J. G. 2000a. AFR: Problems of definition, calculation and measurement in a commercial environment. In Proceedings of the Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium.
7. ELERATH, J. G. 2000b. Specifying reliability in the disk drive industry: No more MTBFs. In Proceedings of the Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium.
8. ELERATH, J. G. AND SHAH, S. 2004. Server class drives: How reliable are they? In Proceedings of the Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium.
9. GHEMAWAT, S., GOBIOFF, H., AND LEUNG, S.-T. 2003. The Google file system. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP).
10. GIBSON, G. A. 1992. Redundant disk arrays: Reliable, parallel secondary storage. Dissertation. MIT Press, New York.
11. GRAY, J. 1990. A census of tandem system availability between 1985 and 1990. IEEE Trans. Reliabil. 39, 4.
12. GRAY, J. 1986. Why do computers stop and what can be done about it. In Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems.
13. HEATH, T., MARTIN, R. P., AND NGUYEN, T. D. 2002. Improving cluster availability using workstation validation. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS).
14. IYER, R. K., ROSSETTI, D. J., AND HSUEH, M. C 1986. Measurement and modeling of computer reliability as affected by system activity. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 4, 3.
15. KALYANAKRISHNAM, M., KALBARCZYK, Z., AND IYER, R. 1999. Failure data analysis of a LAN of Windows NT-based computers. In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems.
16. KARAGIANNIS, T. 2002. Selfis: A short tutorial. Tech. rep., University of California, Riverside.
17. KARAGIANNIS, T., MOLLE, M., AND FALOUTSOS, M. 2004. Long-range dependence: Ten years of internet traffic modeling. IEEE Internet Comput. 8, 5.
18. LANL. http://www.lanl.gov/projects/ computerscience/data/.
19. LELAND, W E., TAQQU, M. S., WILLINGER, W., AND WILSON, D. V. 1994. On the self-similar nature of ethernet traffic. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 2, 1.
20. LIN, T-T. Y. AND SIEWIOEEK, D. R 1990. Error log analysis: Statistical modeling and heuristic trend analysis. IEEE Trans. Reliabil. 39, 4.
21. MEYER, J. AND WEI, L. 1988. Analysis of workload influence on dependability. In Proceedings of the International Symposium, on Fault-Tolerant Computing.
22. MURPHY, B. AND GENT, T. 1995. Measuring system and software reliability using an automated data collection process. Qual. Reliabil. Eng. Int. 11, 5.
23. NERSC. 2007. Systems disk failure, http://pdsi.nersc.gov/all_diskfailure. php.
24. NURMI, D., BEEVIK, J., AND WOLSKI, R. 2005. Modeling machine availability in enterprise and wide-area distributed computing environments. In International Euro-Par Conference on Parallel Processing.
25. OPPENHEIMER, D. L., GANAPATHI, A., AND PATTERSON, D. A. 2003. Why do internet services fail, and what can be done about it? In USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.
26. PATTERSON, D., GIBSON, G., AND KATZ, R. 1988. A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID). In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD).
27. PINHEIRO, E., WEBER, W D., AND BARROSO, L. A. 2007. Failure trends in a large disk drive population. In Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST).
28. PRABHAKARAN, V., BAIRAVASUNDARAM, L. N., AGRAWAL, N., GUNAWI, H. S., ARPACI-DUSSEAU, A. C., AND ARPACI-DUSSEAU, R. H. 2005. Iron file systems. In Proc. of the 20th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP).
29. Ross, S. M. Introduction to Probability Models. 6th edn. Academic Press.
30. SAHOO, R. K., SIVASUBRAMANIAM, A., SQUILLANTE, M. S., AND ZHANG, Y 2004. Failure data analysis of a large-scale heterogeneous server environment. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN).
31. SCHROEDER, B. AND GIBSON, G. A. 2007. Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? In Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST).
32. SCHROEDER, B. AND GIBSON, G. A. 2006. A large-scale study of failures in high-performance computing systems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN).
33. SCHWARZ, T., BAKER, M., BASSI, S., BAUMGART, B., FLAGG, W., VAN INGEN, C., JOSTE, K., MANASSE, M., AND SHAH, M. 2006. Disk failure investigations at the internet archive. In NASA /IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST) Work in Progress Session.
34. TALAGALA, N. AND PATTERSON, D. 1999. An analysis of error behaviour in a large storage system. In The IEEE Workshop on Fault Tolerance in Parallel and Distributed Systems.
35. TANG, D., IYER, R. K., AND SUBRAMANI, S. S. 1990. Failure analysis and modelling of a VAX cluster system. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Fault-tolerant Computing.
36. VAN INGEN, C. AND GRAY, J. 2005. Empirical measurements of disk failure rates and error rates. Tech. Rep. MSR-TR-2005-166, Microsoft Research, December.
37. XU, J., KALBARCZYK, Z., AND IYER, R. K. 1999. Networked Windows NT system field failure data analysis. In Proceedings of the Pacific Rim International Symposium, on Dependable Computing.
38. YANG, J. AND SUN, F.-B. 1999. A comprehensive review of hard-disk drive reliability. In Proceedings of the Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium.