[Beowulf] Are disk MTBF ratings at all useful?

[Geoffrey Jacobs]

On 04/18/2013 06:40 PM, Joe Landman wrote:
> Statistical analysis (called a bathtub analysis).  MTBF's are WAGs at 
> best, and not well matched against empirical observation.

Is anyone familiar with QC steps taken by hard drive manufacturers to
eliminate "infant mortality" problems? Do any third party vendors see
significant statistical advantage to disk stressing to weed out early
failure before rolling product out the door, or does early failure
usually take too long to manifest for hard drives?