I visited Australia 12+ years ago and found it to be a beautiful place with welcoming people. However, I discovered a mindset that I likened to the Wild West days of the US; a deep seated biggotry against the native peoples and a belief that all natural resources were infinate. It seems they have gotten over at least the second bit.
Too bad the bulbs over the heads of our ‘government’ have already burnt out and are therefore incapable of new ideas.
This piece covers a finding by Google engineers that in some ways contradicts commonly heald beliefs that high temperatures and/or high utilization will cause a hard disk to fail sooner.
Basically, they found that there is a weak coorelation between temp and failure rates. It also found that drives up to 3 years old that are used infrequently are more likely to fail than those that have a high utilization.
They also found that a drive with any scan errors (surface errors) is 39 times more likely to fail than a drive with none.
What I took away was this:
– Expect to replace drives after 3 years
– If a drive is showing scan errors, replace it.
– Don’t worry so much about temp & ‘thrashing’.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Hard disk test ‘surprises’ Google
Here is a direct link to the paper itself:Â http://216.239.37.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf