DISKS MTBF ( ST318203FC and ST373405FC )

[Claudia Ferreira]

Hello everybody!

Lately, most of our disks decided to fail down. This fact made us to thing about of them MTBF.
Does anybody have any idea about it?
What is the standard MTBF for these hardwares?

The product number is:
ST318203FC for 18Gb disks and
ST373405FC for 73Gb disks.

[Patrick Wallek]

Here is the Seagate page for the 18GB disks:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/fc/st318203fc.html
MTBF=1,000,000 Hours

Here is the Seagate page for the 73GB disks:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/fc/st373405fc.html
MTBF=1,200,000 Hours

I personally think that the MTBF figures are a load of BS. They may be true if the disk is just sitting there and not being used, but if your disks are heavily utilized then you are going to have disk failures.

If you have a lot of disks failing in a short time I would start to take a look at other things, like power, environmental issues, etc.

[Uwe Zessin]

MTBF is not important for the end-user, because it doesn't say anything about when _his_ disk drive fails. Even if you get a replacement, this one could fail 5 minutes later!

MTBF is only important for the vendors so they have enough spares in stock.


Well, OK, it is important for an end-user who has lots of disks drives, because somebody has to swap them ;-)

[Henrique Nobrega]

Did you discovery the MTBF of Disks? And Do you Know the same information to servers, rp**** ? Thanks!!! [] Henrique Nobrega