Google on hard drive failures

I worked in the disk industry for several years (Fujitsu, Maxtor, and on the silicon side at Cirrus Logic.) and Google's findings are not unexpected. One of the major disk drive manufacturers (Quantum?) discovered a problem with their drives on Unix systems. Since Unix doesn't tend to make spurious reads and writes while sitting idle (Windows does it a LOT), the heads would sit in the same place for long periods of time, eventually pushing the lubricant aside, resulting in a head crash. The manufacturer countered this problem by running a butterfly seek every few minutes to level out the lubricant. In any event, spinup/spindown events are hard on the head/disk interface, and temperature cycling causes expansion/contraction which stresses marginal solder joints. I would expect very long lifetimes from hard drives. Most modern drives use fluid bearings for the spindle so, aside from degradation of the oil, they will last forever. Major IC manufacturers have a good handle on electromigration issues, so the IC's are unlikely to fail. Drive firmware has improved as well. Most drives will detect a block going bad (high correctable error rate) and move the data to a spare block. Unless you issue special commands to the drive you don't even notice the error and relocation occurred. It is a good idea to read everything on the drive occasionally so bad spots can be fixed before they corrupt the data. Enough rambling, Clint On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Tim Shoppa wrote: