Re: Hard drive lifetime: wear from spinning up or rebooting vs running

[Patrik Jonsson <patrik@ucolick.org>]

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Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>>Does anyone have an actual formula?
> 
> 
> I doubt it, because it requires measuring lifetimes, which takes
> years, by which time the data are useless because the disks you used
> are obsolete.

I found this article on drive reliability from Seagate:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/storagereliability/

They do indeed model the temperature derating as an exponential, such
that 25C is the reference temp and at 30C the MTBF is reduced to 78%.
Running the drive at 40C gives you half the lifetime.

Can't find anything about spinup/down though, but they do talk about how
MTBF depends on power-on hours per year, which should be a correlated
quantity. They assume the MTBF goes *up* the fewer POH/yr the drive has,
there's never any reduction due to excessive spinup/down, or at least
the reduction is never dominant. They also talk about the effect of duty
cycle.

cheers,

/Patrik

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