MTTF – What hard drive reliability really means

MTTF – What hard drive reliability really means

There is still no way around HDDs for the cost-effective provision of storage capacity. Different applications require the use of different HDDs. The decisive selection criteria are reliability and operating conditions.

The volume of data continues to grow unrestrained and the challenges for businesses and private users in regards of data storage are constantly increasing. In terms of efficiency, security and costs, it is essential to use the right drives for the different use cases. A decisive criteria is the reliability of an HDD, which relies on several factors such as product specification, ambient conditions, workload or specific application. Especially the aspects operating time, manufacturer warranty, Mean time to failure (MTTF) and annualized failure rate (AFR) must be considered in-depth.  

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Storing the world’s most valuable experimental data
Since 2014, Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH has been a key storage partner of CERN who have 3,200 JBODs carrying 100,000 hard disk drives (HDD) providing 350 PB of storage, 10 PB of which is consumed each month from new data requiring analysis. The original system in 2014 made use of the MG03 4 TB capacity drives, server-grade storage designed for high reliability and optimized for highest capacity at the time.
HAMR vs. MAMR – Microwave technology delivers higher storage densities in hard disks
We are generating more and more data which needs to be stored safely and effectively. Hard disk drives (HDDs) continue to be central to solving this challenge, requiring them to be available with increased storage capacities. In order to provide the necessary technical solutions, engineers are now looking to incorporate microwave-based technologies into HDDs. As cloud services, video streaming and social media continue to increase in popularity data volumes are growing rapidly, challenging data centers to grow their storage capacities to cope with demand. As a result, many large IT companies are planning to add additional data centres to drive capacity higher.
HDD or SSD for storage systems? – Comparing the performance
One of the hottest topics within technology circles is when to move from established technology to the newer version, taking into account the costs and any possible risks. IT professionals are engaged in making this decision, determining whether (and when) SSDs offer better performance than the older, but lower cost, HDD technology. As one of the leading drive manufacturers with significant experience in both HDD and SSD technology, Toshiba Electronics Europe set out to investigate the question as to whether an array of 10krpm HDDs can offer a better performance solution than Enterprise SSDs and, if so, under what conditions?
Long term availability of replacement HDDs for enterprise storage systems
Modern hard drives, and especially enterprise hard drives, are inherently very reliable. Manufacturers such as Toshiba offer warranties of up to five years, which indicates their confidence in the products. Popular models such as Toshiba’s MG06 offer Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) figures of 2.5 million hours – a figure that has been increased from 2 million hours. In the real world, this means that in an installation of 1000 enterprise hard drives, users should expect only two or three drives to fail per year during the warranty period.
Which storage system: HDD or SSD?
The world of data storage is moving on quickly. We are creating more data than ever before, which has to be stored securely and should be easy to retrieve. A couple of decades ago tape was the preferred storage method and these days it is in fact still in use, but limited to very centralised archiving applications. The invention of disc drives based upon high-density spinning magnetic platters – now known as Hard Disc Drives (HDDs) brought higher storage densities and much greater user convenience, especially in terms of data accessibility.

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