KHB: Real-world disk failure rates: temperature

Posted Jun 20, 2007 16:40 UTC (Wed) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Considering the energy needed to manufacture the hard drives and their lower lifetimes I wonder if it truly results in net energy savings.

That's an insightful question, but as the true goal is to save resources in general, and not just energy (or fossil fuels and clean and clear air), the right question is actually a little simpler: Does the money a data center saves on electricity make up for the cost of more frequent replacements? The amount energy used in manfuacturing a drive is reflected in its price.

Of course, we're only speculating at this point that there is any correlation between energy efficiency and failure rate. The one really useful result of these two studies is that manufacturers don't know what their drive lifetimes are, so users have been making buying decisions based on wrong numbers.