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The correlations of 0.03 and -0.04 are weak enough that we shouldn’t draw conclusions from them. The Seagate drives fail very slightly more when they are warmer, while the Hitachi drives fail very slightly more when they are cooler. These are the remaining two drives that have a statistically significant correlation between temperature and failures, but they show very weak correlations and they are in opposite directions. Seagate Barracuda 3TB and Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 The Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 is another one of our older drives, and it shows a more typical non-pattern: This contrasts with most other drives we have, which don’t show that trend. The failure rate of the ST31500541AS does go up at higher temperatures: Why is the correlation weak when these numbers look so obvious? It’s because there’s a lot of overlap between the temperatures of the failed drives and the temperatures of the working drives, so you can’t predict for sure which drives will fail, but the low p-value means that there is a meaningful difference in failure rates. The average temperature of the low power drives is 21.9, while the average for the regular drives is 25.7.Ĭomparing the failure rates of drives that are below the average temperature for the model, and those above the average temperature, there is a clear difference for these drives: It’s interesting that the correlations are similar for the regular 7200 RPM drive and the low power 5900 RPM drive. The correlations of 0.17 and 0.11 are weak, but they are statistically significant. This is the one drive that does show some correlation between temperature and failure rates. Seagate Barracuda & Barracuda LP 1.5TB Heat Failure The correlations that are statistically significant are in bold: Model Here’s the same set of models, this time sorted by correlation. Now, let’s look at the correlation between temperatures and failures for each drive model. And almost all of the drives are in the nice comfortable range from 15° to 30°.Ĭorrelations Between Temperature and Failure for Different Drives As you can see, all of the drives are well within the 0° (or 5°) to 60° that the manufacturers specify for the drives. The chart below shows the distribution of drive temperatures for our four most popular drives. It makes sense that they run cooler because they generate less heat. The first five drives in the above list are all advertised as “green,” low-power drives. The temperatures in the table above are due to differences in the disk drives more than differences in their environment. Pods with different models of drives are distributed somewhat randomly around the data center, so on the average, each model runs in an environment that is about the same. It tends to stay that way over time, too, as drives are replaced. This table shows the average temperature, in degrees Celsius, of different drive models: ModelĮach Storage Pod in our data center is initially deployed with one model of drive in all 45 slots. If in a given ambient air temperature, drive model A runs warmer than drive B, and drive A fails more, that will make it look like there is a correlation when there isn’t. It turns out that different drive models run at different temperatures, and this can throw off the stats when looking at the entire population. The result ranges from -1 to 1, with 0 being no correlation, and 1 meaning hot drives always fail.Ĭorrelation of Temperature and Failure: 0.0 Disk Drive Temperature Range To check correlations, I used the point-biserial correlation coefficient on drive average temperatures and whether drives failed or not.
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All Drives: No CorrelationĪfter looking at data on over 34,000 drives, I found that overall there is no correlation between temperature and failure rate. Google found that temperature was not a good predictor of failure, while Microsoft and the University of Virginia found that there was a significant correlation.ĭisk drive manufacturers tell Backblaze that in general, it’s a good idea to keep disks cooler so they will last longer. Google and Microsoft have both done studies on disk drive temperature in their data centers. Still, different locations inside a Pod, and different locations within a data center will have different temperatures, and we wondered whether that was a problem for the drives. The Backblaze Storage Pod is designed to provide good air flow over the disk drives, so they don’t get too hot. In fact, we recently passed the 100PB mark in our data center. The unlimited online backup service provided by Backblaze requires a lot of storage. How much does operating temperature affect the failure rates of disk drives? Not much.