A new study on hard disks was recently presented at the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies by Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson. The research paper called “Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?” is the culmination of years of statistics gathered from 100,000+ hard drives in a variety of “real world” production environments.

The study reveals a number of fallacies, misconceptions, and some outright lies about storage technology and reliability. High-dollar SCSI, FC, SATA, and even RAID users are in for a few suprises…what you thought you could depend on might not be so dependable. An excellent summary of all the major points can be found over at Storage Mojo in a post entitled “Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong.” And yes, that title sums it up nicely.