An interesting article > Experts: No cure in sight for unpredictable hard drive loss

The article claims:

"Manufacturers have a perverse incentive not to make their drives more reliable, though, since they need to keep selling drives to stay in business. "

That is not entirely true. They do not have to make HDDs more reliable.

The bulk of HDD manufacturers' profits (when they manage to turn any profit) comes from high end drives, which I believe Google would have none of. With Google it's all commodity junk that has fared very well compared to what was paid for them.

For the high end (external storage) drives, acceptable failure rate is 0.21-0.24% a year, depending whether they are Fiber channel 2000-4000US$ a piece drives or SATA for less than 600US$.

To meet that requirement, Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital make their drives meet 0.19% failure rate. Like, 2 out of 100 drives failures a year.

Not only that, there is whole ecosystem of protections and cross copies, snapshots, business continuance and remote replication that makes enterprise storage far more . 999.99 reliable.

From the graph in the link, it shows that commodity drives Google uses are within that bracket for the first year. Then they start failing more often.

Naively, the article is wondering :

The data was also gleaned from production enterprise systems and looked at more than 100,000 drives, much like the Google study. It was not immediately clear why the two studies would produce such different results.

That's where and that's why corporate external storage would be at least 3 times more reliable than Google's infrastructure.

Indeed, if Google gives you a free email address and free storage for your home pictures and videos, they don't owe you best possible and most expensive storage infrastructure.

Hello.

Little update here - ade a VERY good experience with Synnex today!

So i did manage to get pretty much all my data off the almost-dead drive by using the old "put in the freezer over night" trick - it really worked, well the drive ran for about half an hour without data corruption and that was enough, got everything off and even half way through a format before it died again.

So today i went to Synnex on 1 1/2 floor of Panthip Plaza. And, to my surprise (i expected at least a week's waiting time) the drive was exchanged pretty much "on the spot", i had to wait like 20 minutes while they did some testing, then i was given another drive of the same type (which says "re-certified" so i guess it is a repaired former warranty case?) with the remainder of my original warranty on it - still well over three years, so i am fine with that.

And yeah, no questions asked, no receipt needed - the Synnex-sticker was sufficient.

Best regards.....

Thanh