[Cialug] Google Hard Drive Study

[David Champion]

Nathan Stien wrote:
> On 3/8/07, Matthew Nuzum <matthew.nuzum at canonical.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 13:17 -0600, Nathan Stien wrote:
>> > 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.
> 
> How can there be lawsuits for saying "We saw ${FRACTION}% of our
> $BRAND drives fail within $TIMEFRAME", etc.?  This is, just as you
> say, a historic account of what happened to some hard drives in one
> particular data center.  They need only make descriptive statements of
> observed facts, not normative statements about what you should buy.
> Further implications could (and should) be left as an exercise for the
> reader.
> 
> I'm not really trying to argue, but rather just to understand how this
> works.  How would talking about observed failure rates of any given
> pieces of hardware get you into legal trouble?
> 
> I'm an engineer, not a lawyer, and I just don't grok this.  To my
> thinking, the more openly-published empirical hardware statistics we
> can get, the better off everyone is.  It could encourage more open and
> honest competition between hardware vendors, which seems like a Good
> Thing (tm).
> 

You can file a civil lawsuit for just about anything, regardless of 
merit. Yay!

My guess would be that Google asked the drive manufacturers, and they 
said they didn't want to have this data published. This sucks, but it's 
smart on Google's part, if they want to avoid being sued.

-dc