No evidence Fibre Channel more reliable than SATA

"Hard disks are far less reliable than disk vendors routinely claim, a study by Carnegie Mellon University has suggested.

The research, presented at the recent 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose, found that replacement rates in a sample of 100,000 drives used in high-performance environments was between two and four percent annually, which contrasts with the official industry mean time between failure (MTBF) failure rates said to work out at 0.88 percent per annum. On some systems, failure rates were observed to be up to 13 percent.

The study also found no evidence that expensive Fibre Channel (FC) drives were any less likely to fail than the cheaper and slower Serial ATA (SATA) drives."

Source:
John E. Dunn
TechWorld
March 2, 2007
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