今年年初 (一月) 的時候發表過一次「各家硬碟的耐用程度...」引起爭議厚的最新力做,九月再發表一次:「Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014」。
灰色部份是一月的數據,其他顏色是九月的數據。文中有考慮是否要換成企業級的硬碟 (enterprise drives),但兩個評估的答案是否定的。
第一個評估是成本考量,就算一般硬碟以三年保固期有 15% 的 failure rate,相較於企業級 0% failure rate 計算 (於是直接算成 10 年),成本是不划算的:
Today on Amazon, a Seagate 3 TB “enterprise” drive costs $235 versus a Seagate 3 TB “desktop” drive costs $102. Most of the drives we get have a 3-year warranty, making failures a non-issue from a cost perspective for that period. However, even if there were no warranty, a 15% annual failure rate on the consumer “desktop” drive and a 0% failure rate on the “enterprise” drive, the breakeven would be 10 years, which is longer than we expect to even run the drives for.
更何況企業級硬碟的情況根本沒什麼差:
The assumption that “enterprise” drives would work better than “consumer” drives has not been true in our tests. I analyzed both of these types of drives in our system and found that their failure rates in our environment were very similar — with the “consumer” drives actually being slightly more reliable.