It has been written many times in these pages, and it begs repeating: this rover was sent on a 90-day expedition, with the mission success mobility objective of driving 600 meters. In March, Opportunity completed 42.195 kilometers or 26.2 miles. It’s the first marathon “run” on another planet. And in April – the 4000th sol. “This rover just keeps giving and giving,” said Planetary Society President Jim Bell, professor of astronomy and planetary scientist at Arizona State University and lead scientist on the MERs’ panoramic cameras (Pancams).
Tag Archives: reliability
Three-year, 27,000 drive study reveals the most reliable hard drive makers
For this report, Backblaze took a look at 15 different HDD models from the three aforementioned major brands. Earning impressive marks for reliability was the Hitachi 3TB Deskstar 7K3000 (HDS723030ALA640) with a 0.9 percent failure rate and an average lifetime of about 2.1 years.
via Three-year, 27,000 drive study reveals the most reliable hard drive makers | PCWorld.
The worst of the bunch, meanwhile was the 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda Green (ST1500DL003), with an average lifespan of 0.8 years. Ouch!
What Hard Drive Should I Buy?
At the end of 2013, we had 27,134 consumer-grade drives spinning in Backblaze Storage Pods. The breakdown by brand looks like this:
Hard Drives by Manufacturer
Brand Number
of DrivesTerabytes Average
Age in YearsSeagate 12,765 39,576 1.4 Hitachi 12,956 36,078 2.0 Western Digital 2,838 2,581 2.5 Toshiba 58 174 0.7 Samsung 18 18 3.7
via Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?.
Why do we have the drives we have? Basically, we buy the least expensive drives that will work
There are a lot of numbers tossed around in this article that are difficult to summarize. The above table shows the data set they worked from.
Cloud Providers Work To Disperse Points Of Failure
In the end, cloud providers — many of which aim for 99.9 percent uptime, or “three nines” — are likely to offer individual companies a more reliable service than those companies attain for themselves, the CSA’s Howie says.
via Cloud Providers Work To Disperse Points Of Failure – Dark Reading.
Note that telecom typically operates under 5 nines uptime. The point of this article may be that end users need to implement their own backup plans to get higher than three 9s reliability.
Mars Rover Curiosity in Safe Mode After Computer Glitch
The issue cropped up Wednesday (Feb. 27), when the spacecraft failed to send its recorded data back to Earth and did not switch into its daily sleep mode as planned. After looking into the issue, engineers decided to switch the Curiosity rover from its primary “A-side” computer to its “B-side” backup on Thursday at 5:30 p.m. EST (22:30 GMT). [Curiosity Rover’s Latest Amazing Mars Photos]
via Mars Rover Curiosity in Safe Mode After Computer Glitch | Space.com.
How SSD power faults scramble your data
The 2 SSDs that had no failures? Both were MLC 2012 model years with a mid-range – $1.17/GB – price.
via How SSD power faults scramble your data | ZDNet.
Yikes!
This paper reminds us that SSDs are very new technology whose idiosyncracies are still being engineered around. We’re still 5 years away from the average enterprise SSD being as reliable as the average enterprise hard drive is today.
Is Maintenance Making Your Facility Less Reliable?
“Maintenance is a very lucrative business,” said Fairfax, who said guidance from equipment vendors sometimes slip into FUD (fear, uncertainty doubt) rather than sound methodology. “They want to keep selling their maintenance plans. To overcome this preventive maintenance threat, we must attack false learning. More is not always better.”
via Is Maintenance Making Your Facility Less Reliable? » Data Center Knowledge.
File this under don’t fix what ain’t broke.