Is my Hard Drive About to Fail?

Yes.

Longer answer - all drives fail eventually. I'm starting to get a little nervous because my main system hard drive is nearly five years old. It's had a good run, but the odds are starting to stack up against it.

Google published Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population a couple of years ago. The (possibly) surprising conclusion of the paper was that drive temperature and activity are less important factors in predicting a drive failure than the presence of any errors.

The chart below (from the Google paper) shows the average failure rate for drives with no scan errors and drives reporting one more more scan errors (hard drives scan their surface in the background and report any errors found):



The paper goes on to say:

The critical threshold analysis confirms what the charts visually imply: the critical threshold for scan errors is one. After the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without scan errors.

It's interesting to note the much higher failure rate in the first six months. Google attributes this to an "infant mortality phenomenon" - some drives are lemons.

The same pattern repeats itself for several other factors including reallocation, where the contents of a bad sector are moved to a new, good sector and probation, when the drive suspects that a sector might be a troublemaker in the future.

All this suggests that you should take action at the very first sign of trouble with your hard drive. Counter-intuitively this advice is even more important if your drive is brand new. I'm going to buy a new drive for my system and use my five year old for less important data.

posted by Rob on Tuesday, June 23, 2009

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