Disk drive reliability case study: dependence upon head fly-height and quantity of heads

Elerath, J.G.; Shah, Sahriza Salwani Md

doi:10.1109/rams.2003.1182057

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Some studies also look at the factors affecting disk failure rate, such as disk model, the number of disk heads, disk size, and environmental factors [Bairavasundaram et al 2007;Elerath and Shah 2003;Pinheiro et al 2007]. Similarly, in this article, we looked at factors affecting storage failure rate, and found that some factors strongly affecting storage failure rate have little impact on disk failure rate.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 65%

Are disks the dominant contributor for storage failures?

Jiang

Zhou

et al. 2008

ACM Trans. Storage

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Building reliable storage systems becomes increasingly challenging as the complexity of modern storage systems continues to grow. Understanding storage failure characteristics is crucially important for designing and building a reliable storage system. While several recent studies have been conducted on understanding storage failures, almost all of them focus on the failure characteristics of one component-disks-and do not study other storage component failures.This article analyzes the failure characteristics of storage subsystems. More specifically, we analyzed the storage logs collected from about 39,000 storage systems commercially deployed at various customer sites. The dataset covers a period of 44 months and includes about 1,800,000 disks hosted in about 155,000 storage-shelf enclosures. Our study reveals many interesting findings, providing useful guidelines for designing reliable storage systems. Some of our major findings include: (1) In addition to disk failures that contribute to 20-55% of storage subsystem failures, other components such as physical interconnects and protocol stacks also account for a significant percentage of storage subsystem failures. (2) Each individual storage subsystem failure type, and storage subsystem failure as a whole, exhibits strong self-correlations. In addition, these failures exhibit "bursty" patterns. (3) Storage subsystems configured with redundant interconnects experience 30-40% lower failure rates than those with a single interconnect. (4) Spanning disks of a RAID group across multiple shelves provides a more resilient solution for storage subsystems than within a single shelf.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 65%

Are disks the dominant contributor for storage failures?

Jiang

Zhou

et al. 2008

ACM Trans. Storage

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“…We have reviewed the literature over the past decade and a half in an effort to understand what important factors these studies have uncovered [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Despite the importance of the hard disk drive there has been very little large-scale work analyzing their failure trends.…”

Section: Disk Failurementioning

confidence: 99%

Substituting Disk Failure Avoidance for Redundancy in Wide Area Fault Tolerant Storage Systems

Brumgard

Beck

2012

2012 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing Workshops

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The primary mechanism for overcoming faults in modern storage systems is to introduce redundancy in the form of replication and/or error correcting codes. The costs of such redundancy in hardware, system availability and overall complexity can be substantial, depending on the number and pattern of faults that are handled. In this paper, we describe a system that seeks to use disk failure avoidance to reduce the need for costly redundancy by using adaptive heuristics that predict such failures. While a number of predictive factors such as hard drive utilization rate, age, SMART errors, and model can be used, the initial work we present here focuses on SMART errors. Our approach can predict where near term disk failures are more likely to occur, enabling proactive movement/replication of atrisk data, thus maintaining data integrity and availability. Our strategy can reduce costs due to redundant storage without compromising these important requirements.

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“…They also provide evidence of a significant early onset of wear-out degradation, which signifies inconsistencies in product quality. Elerath and Shah (2003) show that in hard drive manufacturing, there is a clear significant relationship between reliability and the number of mechanically moving read/write heads. They conclude that there is a critical need for design technology and manufacturing processes to advance fast enough to counteract potential degradation in reliability problems as faster drives are introduced.…”

Section: Motivating Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%