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#1
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What is an individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems?
Hello,
I'm considering buying a new enterprise storage system. I know there are a lot of factors to be considered, and most of them are reviewed. But one of the factors which is not clear yet is the individual disk drive failure rate. It may not be important as long as the system is protected by proper raid configurations, but I've still got this request by the company to adapt storage systems, and at least I need to explain the company with proper reason. Is the individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems lower than that of EMC? I heard the disk drive failure rate of EMC storages is a lot higher than that of HDS. But others provide some reasons, which may make sense in some way, for example, HDS leaves disk drives until they are really "destroyed", but EMC replaces them proactively before they encounter serious problems. I'm not quite sure whether above statements are true or not. Can anyone provide me any idea or data if HDS systems' drive failure rate is really higher, and why? |
#2
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What is an individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems?
We have two HDS 9980Vs.
The first one has 136 disks. Last year it looks like this array had 6 disk replaced. The second array has 160 disks and it had 5 disks replaced. I know that HDS proactivly replaces disks... I don't know how many of the 11 disks that were replaced were "dead" and how many were simply showing signs of a pending failure... These 2 arrays are also 2.5 years old... |
#3
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What is an individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems?
I'm currently using a HDS Thunder 9570. The storage subsystem does a
pre-emptive call back when it detects hard disk abnormality. My array is still in working condition(all disks showing activity). When the HDS guy came to swap the disk. Only the spare, where the data had been copied to and the replaced disk are busy(having lots of activity). The whole disk group was not rebuilt. Well, If you're considering HDS, i would encourage you to have a look at their NSC55. Read the ESG's report. It's truly remarkable. Hot online migrating of Database to another storage subsystem with no downtime. In one of the test, they even show that a client can streaming video from the storage without interruption while migrating to another subsystem. This is what i call true virtualization. I would love tiered storage for myself. As not all data is made equal, I would love to transfer them to a lower end storage array without getting the data offline. You could use any lower end storage and virtualize them with the NSC55. Including EMCs.... HP's MSA |
#4
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What is an individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems?
To add on, If you are so afraid of having a raid group failure, choose
a storage subsystem with RAID6 capability. Especially important if you want to use SATA disks. Imagine the prolong disk activity when building 8X400GB of cheap unreliable disks. It may fail anytime when u're rebuilding it. I've had SATA array rebuild failure(Especially dangerous on Huge array of cheap unreliable disks) on my direct attach storage(Dell servers) before. Trusts me... You don't wanna go there. |
#5
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What is an individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems?
On 12 Jan 2006 00:52:26 -0800, "hellur" wrote:
Hello, I'm considering buying a new enterprise storage system. I know there are a lot of factors to be considered, and most of them are reviewed. But one of the factors which is not clear yet is the individual disk drive failure rate. It may not be important as long as the system is protected by proper raid configurations, but I've still got this request by the company to adapt storage systems, and at least I need to explain the company with proper reason. Is the individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems lower than that of EMC? I heard the disk drive failure rate of EMC storages is a lot higher than that of HDS. But others provide some reasons, which may make sense in some way, for example, HDS leaves disk drives until they are really "destroyed", but EMC replaces them proactively before they encounter serious problems. I'm not quite sure whether above statements are true or not. Can anyone provide me any idea or data if HDS systems' drive failure rate is really higher, and why? They use the same drives from the same manufacturers. Drive failure rate should hardly be a factor in your decision. ~F |
#6
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What is an individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems?
hi,
all arrays suffer from drive failures and most use the same drive vendor to purchase their disks.... failures prob average out between say emc / hds / netapp / 3part / eva etc... the actual question of drive failure becomes irrelevent. What you should really be asking is how the pre-emtive diags work out when a drive fails, and more importantly what drive rebuild times are. As drives become bigger in density, drive rebuild could and will start stretching out - this becomes the biggest question. focus your questions to the vendor on how RAID is employed, Understanding how the array diags behave, what cpu hit you may get within the array if you are calculating data from checksum information, and also - not just how raid is employed from a complete disk level but also you may use drive splits so that data from one individual disk (and each of its splits) may have a raid-1 mirror to a whole bunch of other disks. anyway - that is a few of my ideas all of these vendors are offering decent electronics and "brown spinney stuff" it is how they differentiate themselves. Also - dont forget the most important thing - how good their support model is... drives fail and get replaced - but if you dont get the engineer to site to fix this stuff, and is good at his / her "stuff" you will really struggle.. hope this helps, S. On 12 Jan 2006 00:52:26 -0800, "hellur" wrote: Hello, I'm considering buying a new enterprise storage system. I know there are a lot of factors to be considered, and most of them are reviewed. But one of the factors which is not clear yet is the individual disk drive failure rate. It may not be important as long as the system is protected by proper raid configurations, but I've still got this request by the company to adapt storage systems, and at least I need to explain the company with proper reason. Is the individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems lower than that of EMC? I heard the disk drive failure rate of EMC storages is a lot higher than that of HDS. But others provide some reasons, which may make sense in some way, for example, HDS leaves disk drives until they are really "destroyed", but EMC replaces them proactively before they encounter serious problems. I'm not quite sure whether above statements are true or not. Can anyone provide me any idea or data if HDS systems' drive failure rate is really higher, and why? |
#7
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What is an individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems?
PS - dont believe all of the gossip you hear of drive failures from
EMC - track record we have had with them has been excellent... we have literally hundereds of symms within our org - and they are very well behaved. On 12 Jan 2006 00:52:26 -0800, "hellur" wrote: Hello, I'm considering buying a new enterprise storage system. I know there are a lot of factors to be considered, and most of them are reviewed. But one of the factors which is not clear yet is the individual disk drive failure rate. It may not be important as long as the system is protected by proper raid configurations, but I've still got this request by the company to adapt storage systems, and at least I need to explain the company with proper reason. Is the individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems lower than that of EMC? I heard the disk drive failure rate of EMC storages is a lot higher than that of HDS. But others provide some reasons, which may make sense in some way, for example, HDS leaves disk drives until they are really "destroyed", but EMC replaces them proactively before they encounter serious problems. I'm not quite sure whether above statements are true or not. Can anyone provide me any idea or data if HDS systems' drive failure rate is really higher, and why? |
#8
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What is an individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems?
Actually HDS makes thier own drives... and claim a higher MTBF...
FWIW... |
#9
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What is an individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems?
John S. wrote:
Actually HDS makes thier own drives... and claim a higher MTBF... Whilst Hitachi do make their own drives, the MTBF's are basically the same as the other equivalent drives from other manufacturers. ie, within the 1.0 to 1.5 million hours range. Scott. |
#10
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What is an individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems?
hellur wrote:
Is the individual disk drive failure rate of HDS storage systems lower than that of EMC? It depends how you measure "failure". Both EMC and HDS arrays will have disks "replaced" at a higher rate than most other arrays, and in fact in many cases at higher than MTBF rates. But the majority of the disks will not have "failed" as such - they will actually be proactive replacements, where the array has detected one of a number of indicators that the disk _may_ be on it's way to failure, and will hot-spare it out before it actually fails. The nett result is an apparent higher rate of failures, but also a lower chance of actual data loss as the replacements are proactive (pre-failure) rather than reactive (post-failure). Scott |
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