[Beowulf] cold spare storage?

[mathog]

On 17-Aug-2017 11:10, Alex Chekholko wrote:
> The Google paper from a few years ago showed essentially no 
> correlations
> between the things you ask about and failure rates.  So... do whatever 
> is
> most convenient for you.

This one?

   http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

They didn't do a control where they put some drives on a shelf and then 
tested
them later. Nor did they (as far as I can tell) do a control with 
installed disks powered on but not spun up.  Every disk they tested was 
fully "live".  It is true that they didn't see any big difference based 
on usage, temperature, or vibration (to the limited extent they could 
measure this).

Also that study was published in 2007 so the 5 year failure rates are 
for disks which were made in 2001 or 2002.  That is a long, long time 
ago in terms of disk technology and density.  I'm not even sure that I 
believe their results from 10 years ago are still fully applicable to 
current disks.

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech