[Cialug] Google Hard Drive Study

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 13:17 -0600, Nathan Stien wrote:
> Google was oddly stingy about some of the results:
> 
>   3.2    Manufacturers, Models, and Vintages
>   ... However, in this paper, we do not show a
>   breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage
>   due to the proprietary nature of these data.
> 
> Proprietary nature of these data?  Observed failure rates of various
> hardware models doesn't seem proprietary to me.

Tom's hardware does hardware reviews and targets a certain market.
Google's data is not indicative of what will happen to most people...
it's a historic account of what happened to some hard drives in one
particular data center.

If the point of the article was to get the industry talking about this
issue, and to help storage administrators understand actual failure
rates, then releasing drive vendor failure information wouldn't help...
releasing drive vendor information would likely lead to lawsuits and
other unpleasantness which probably was not the goal.
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode