Disk Links

I recently wanted to upgrade my storage at home. I wanted to check out the most recent reliability ratings for hard drives. What I found from casual searching was a more than a little alarming.

1) "Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?", by Bianca Schroeder and Garth A. Gibson
2) "An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack", by Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram, Garth R. Goodson, Bianca Schroeder, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
3) "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population", by Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andr´e Barroso

So what do I think after reading these papers?

1) Drive failures happen even if you buy expensive disks.
2) My circa 2000 drives at home should be retired, the sooner the better.
3) I'm in the right business - Backups are critical - nothing I read changes my mind about the value of having multiple copies of your data.

I’ll leave you with one other disk related link. This link is unrelated to disk failures at all.

The article is a great introduction to setting up NetBackup media server with disk storage units on a Sun Fire X4500.I would love to see a few more hardware vendors publish some configuration guides like this complete with useful metrics.

"Sun Fire X4500 as a Media Server for Symantec Veritas NetBackup 6.5", by Ryan Arneson

Message Edited by TimBur on 04-28-2008 03:23 PM