Stress Testing Hard Drives

[Phil Thayer]

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: kclug-bounces at kclug.org 
> [mailto:kclug-bounces at kclug.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Hutchins
> Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 5:16 PM
> To: kclug at kclug.org
> 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.
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