HDD Myths

According to the recent Carnegie Mellon University and Google research, they dispelled some popular myths listed below about disk drives. I found them quite informative as I used to believed in some of the myths!!!!

• Enterprise drives are no more reliable than consumer drives. The extra money seems to go for margin and warranty costs. These are mass-produced products. There is no secret to making a disk last 3x.
• SMART drive status reporting is pretty useless. If SMART is telling you there is a problem, there probably is a problem. But if it reports no problem, that means nothing.
• Workload has no effect on drive life. So use it all you want. Google did find that a heavy workload increases infant mortality, so when you install a new drive work it hard so you can replace it while it is still economic to do so.
• Ambient temperature has very little effect on drive life until it gets up over 104 F. or 40 C. Even then the effect is slight.

The weird thing is that although they managed to dispel the myths, they could not consolidate as to what factors WOULD affect disk drive performance. However, they agreed that LUCK is one important factor!!! LOL!!!