Is Data Loss in Your Future?

Recently it was announced that Seagate and Western Digital were dropping the warranty from 5 years to just 1 or 2 for a large majority of their hard drives. Granted these are consumer grade drives, but the concerning thing about this statement is it is more or less an acknowledgement that drive failure rates are probably more common than we'd like to think. I don't know if the floods in Thailand have had any influence on this (no, according to WD), but I suspect it is at least playing some role. The manufacturing of hard drives is such a sensitive practice, and the only two drive makers in the world are now dealing with the residual effects of this...

Even though these are consumer drives we are talking about, and the support agreement you have with your enterprise array vendor won't change, one has to wonder what this says about the drives spinning on your datacenter floor today and the ones you're ordering for tomorrow. After all, this research paper done by Carnegie Melon University showed the MTBF between enterprise and consumer grade drives are roughly the same. And a similar Google study on drive failures also confirmed drive manufacturers MTBF numbers were generously overstated. 

Most enterprise storage vendors have the ability to provide you with a dual disk parity scheme yet so many are reluctant to build systems that way. With all the things NetApp does well this is something that seems to get lost in the mix. We've been shipping systems with RAID-DP (our dual disk parity scheme) for the better part of half a decade in order to guarantee the safety of our customers data. As array vendors continue to add features and complexity to their offerings the underlying data structure oftentimes gets glossed over, especially when data is being moved at the sub-lun level and a single LUN may be spread across different RAID levels.

Although there is nothing particularly sexy or exciting about disk parity schemes, it is still a very, very important piece of the puzzle. If your solution providers and vendors aren't designing your systems with the highest levels of protection in mind you could be unknowingly introducing the possibility for data loss in your environment. Safeguarding your businesses information should be priority one, and with drive quality issues in doubt both now and in the future why expose yourself to risk if you don't have to?