Thursday, May 15, 2014

Hard Drive Temperature

Brian Beach (via Josh Centers):

Google and Microsoft have both done studies on disk drive temperature in their data centers. Google found that temperature was not a good predictor of failure, while Microsoft and the University of Virginia found that there was a significant correlation.

Disk drive manufacturers tell Backblaze that in general, it’s a good idea to keep disks cooler so they will last longer.

[…]

After looking at data on over 34,000 drives, I found that overall there is no correlation between temperature and failure rate.

[…]

Each Storage Pod in our data center is initially deployed with one model of drive in all 45 slots. It tends to stay that way over time, too, as drives are replaced. Pods with different models of drives are distributed somewhat randomly around the data center, so on the average, each model runs in an environment that is about the same. The temperatures in the table above are due to differences in the disk drives more than differences in their environment.

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"Google and Microsoft have both done studies on disk drive temperature in their data centers. Google found that temperature was not a good predictor of failure, while Microsoft and the University of Virginia found that there was a significant correlation ... After looking at data on over 34,000 drives, I found that overall there is no correlation between temperature and failure rate."

So who do we trust?

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