Well, they certainly don't run the drives for 1.4 million hours (the MTBF for a Seagate Cheetah NS) to determine if it will fail. What they have is a testing facility where they run read/write tests on large numbers of drives. They then take the failure results of that test and extrapolate it out to get 1.4 million hours or somewhere around 159 years. If you look at the Seagate Barracuda the MTBF drops to 750,000 hours. This equates to only 85.6 years or about half the Cheetah NS drive. Both the same basic technology as far as the disk platter goes.
Phil
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Hutchins Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 5:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Stress Testing Hard Drives
On Tuesday 26 June 2007 04:56:40 pm Phil Thayer wrote:
What happens with the disk drive manufacturers is that they
will test
the HD as part of the last step in the manufacturing
process. They will
classify them as to their reliability.
So 'splain to me, if the only way to tell how long a drive is going to last before it fails is to run it until it fails, how exactly are they testing them?
You may hope that the drives certified for SAN have a tighter quality control standard, but it's not reliability testing that's used to classify them. That's done strictly on a sample basis, not on each piece. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list [email protected] http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug