Google has an infrastructure which contains hundreds of thousands of computers and a large portion of these are equipped with standard retail components, even the harddrives are retail. Google has earlier published studies based on data coming from its constant surveys of its system. This harddrive study (via TGDaily) offers some very interesting reading for several reasons. Above all, it has come to the conclusion that high temperatures doesn’t lead to crashes, but that lower temperatures are in fact more dangerous.
At the same time it seems that activity doesn’t really matter, if the harddrive survives the first six months there is no direct connection between activity and the lifespan. Although there is a connection between the age of the drive and the frequency of the cashes, but there is an interesting curve which appears during the second year where the crash frequency quadruples (1,7% to 8%), but then during the third year it flattens out again (8,6%).
