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Listen to the podcast: Your hard disk is
more likely to fail than you think.. Transcript This is Leo Notenboom for askleo.info. Several weeks ago Google released a paper detailing an analysis of the consumer-grade hard drives they use in their data centers. As you can imagine, Google has a lot of hard drives. They were looking at what could be learned from hard disk failure rates. One surprising result was that they determined that hard disks Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, or "SMART" as it's known, could not be used to accurately predict when or if a drive was about to fail. Drives reporting SMART errors often lasted for years, while other drives were just as likely to fail without any SMART diagnostic information prior to the failure. Much more importantly, though, are what I think are some very scary numbers about hard drive failure rates. For example, for drives older than 2 years, Google reports seeing about a 7% failure rate per year. Put another way, one out of ever 14 drives will fail within a year. That's way higher than I would have predicted. It also makes me very nervous. Disk drives are cheap, but the cost of replacing one can be enormous. For example, unless you're doing true full backups a sudden failure means you're going to have to reinstall and reconfigure your operating system and all the applications you had on a failed drive. If you've been backing up your data you may not experience data loss but you'll definitely lose a chunk of time for the rebuild. And if you haven't even been backing up your data - well, you've got a serious problem. There are several possible approaches to minimizing the risk of a hard drive failure, but for the average consumer nothing, and I mean nothing can replace a good full backup strategy. In fact, after hearing these new statistics, it's a change I made myself. In
the past I'd been backing up my important data, of course, but not my operating
system and applications. As of earlier this week I now do a nightly backup of
the entire hard disk on my primary computer using Acronis Trueimage
Home. Regular listeners and readers of Ask Leo! will know that I've always stressed the importance of backing up. Google's latest report only makes me even more convinced that disaster prevention isn't just a good thing, it's a requirement. Check out the show notes for links to Google's whitepaper and to a similar study performed at Carnegie Mellon University with similar results. I've also linked to an episode of the highly recommended Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte which covers this issue as well. I'd love to hear what you think. Visit askleo.info and enter 11293 in the go to article number box to access the show notes and to leave me a comment. While you're there, browse over 1,000 technical questions and answers on the site. Till next time, I'm Leo Notenboom, for askleo.info. Related:
• Recent Comments
7%? That is Much higher than we have, we've been lucky i guess. 7%-- I have had # failures in the last ywar. one only lasted 4 months--i back up full all the time. Posted by: Gerald Malcolm at March 30, 2007 07:09 PMAcronis True Image can make image backups either from within Windows or outside Windows running from a bootable CD. I would only trust an image backup made from outside Windows, but that's me. The entire True Image v8 manual however was geared to backups from within Windows. Recently I tried to make True Image backups from a boot CD on a machine without a PS/2 port. Despite being Linux, both v7 and v8 failed to detect the USB keyboard. But my biggest gripe with True Image is that it can not make a true image. That is, it is incapable of doing the basic job of an imaging product, make a sector by sector copy. For details see http://www.computergripes.com/trueimage.html Posted by: Michael Horowitz at March 30, 2007 09:03 PMI think Google probably runs their hard discs pretty hard that way they get a better ROI. I doubt any of us are running HDs 24/7. From a HDs point of view you could easily think of 2 years work at Google being the equivalent of 5 years in a home or office environment. Posted by: Gideon at March 30, 2007 11:39 PMI just listened to the podcast on hard drive failure. Expensive, yes,to the tune of about $465. I wish I had known this sooner. Thank you for your newsletter. I'll keep reading! Posted by: Ann E. Hynes at March 31, 2007 08:09 PMBought a new HP Pavilion notebook and the hard disk died after only 5 months of use. HP shipped me a new one, but I wasted 3 days rebuilding everything. I now, as Leo, use Acronis TrueImage to backup my hard disk so next time my disk crashes or is trashed I'll save those wasted 3 days. I've had one failure in the 15-20 years that I have owned a computer. That drive did fail during its first year. Posted by: Vicki Williams at December 29, 2007 04:42 AMPost a comment on "Your hard disk is more likely to fail than you think.":
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