Posted on 03/08/2016 8:34:18 AM PST by dennisw
Heat doesn't kill hard drives. Here's what does"Free-cooled" datacenters use ambient outside air instead of air conditioning. That lets us see how environment affects system components. Biggest surprise: temperature is not the disk drive killing monster we thought. Here's what is.
At last months Usenix FAST 16 conference, in the Best Paper award winner Environmental Conditions and Disk Reliability in Free-cooled Datacenters, researchers Ioannis Manousakis and Thu D. Nguyen, of Rutgers, Sriram Sankar of GoDaddy, and Gregg McKnight and Ricardo Bianchini of Microsoft, studied how the higher and more variable temperatures and humidity of free-cooling affect hardware components. They reached three key conclusions:
Relative humidity, not higher or more variable temperatures, has a dominant impact on disk failures. High relative humidity causes disk failures largely due to controller/adapter malfunction. Despite the higher failure rates, software to mask failures and enable free-cooling is a huge money-saver.
Background
Datacenters are energy hogs. A web-scale datacenter can use more than 30 megawatts and collectively they are estimated to use 2 percent of US electricity production.
Moreover, the chillers for water cooling and the backup power required to keep them running in a blackout are costly too. As the use of cloud services has grown, the cost of hyperscale datacenters has led to more experimentation such as free-cooling and higher operating temperatures.
But to fully optimize these techniques, operators also need to understand their impact on the equipment. If lower energy costs are offset by higher hardware costs and downtime, it isn't a win. The study
The researchers looked at 9 Microsoft datacenters around the world for periods ranging from 1.5 to 4 years, covering over 1 million drives. They gathered environmental data including temperature and relative humidity and the variation of each.
Being good scientists, they took the data and built a model to analyze the results. They quantified the trade-offs between energy, environment, reliability, and cost. Finally, they have some suggestions for datacenter design.
Key findings:
Disks account for an average of 89 percent of component failures. DIMMs are 2nd at 10 percent. [Disks are the most common component in datacenters.] Relative humidity is the major reliability factor - more so than temperature - even when the data center is operating within industry standards. Disk controller/connectivity failures are greatest during high relative humidity. Server designs that place disks at the back of the server are more reliable in high humidity. Despite the higher failure rates, software mitigation allows cloud providers to save a lot of money with free-cooling. High temperatures are not harmless, but are much less significant than other factors.
That last finding is key to why the cloud clobbers current array products. It is good for global warming and good for the bottom line.
____SNIP______________
[[If I bake my old Seagate and Samsung hard drives in the oven at 500+ degrees for four hours, will that make them safe enough for the landfill or would I still want to take a ball-peen hammer to them?]]
If you have access to a drill with metal bit, drill 3-5 holes through hte disks- and then as extra precaution take a sledge hammer to it- but really- people aren’t going through landfills looking for hard-drives to steal info from usually- the risk is very very small- You coudl also disassemble the whole thing and scatter the 4 disks *(after smashing them up) to the 4 winds-
[[The price wasn’t mentioned.]]
Likely out of courtesy to the readers lol
I'm sure some Denver located organizations know.
Thinking maybe that humidity might affect cooling — evaporation. Higher humidity means less evaporation. And the moisture takes on the temperature of the environment making cooling less efficient.
However, aren’t they referring to the change in humidity versus the nominal humidity?
I cannot imagine anyone putting 100% trust in “the cloud” for primary data storage
Secondary backup, OK... maybe even PRIMARY backup. But your whole life in some unknown location?
I just can’t see it
I guess we’ll have to rethink entropy.
I did get the impression that they are intended for the commercial market.
I much prefer high speed penetration tests with a projectile running anywhere from 2,600 to 3,600 fps.
It sounded like the proponderence of the failures were with the control board and the connections to the inside guts of the drives.
It sounded like the preponderance of the failures were with the control board and the connections to the inside guts of the drives.
In the offhand position, @ 500 meters, iron sights.
Drill through the case and destroy the platters or mix up some homemade thermite and melt it.
Never throw away a sealed HDD. If the platters are intact, something can be recovered.
Well, no, but I have an awesome picture of a drive with a nice hole dead center from about 80 yards using iron sights.
Stacking drives together is more fun, especially when shooting hollow points.
roger that! thanks.
10-4!
Interesting.
Another aspect of disk drives is that they very cost sensitive (mostly because they are high volume) so engineers will spend a lot of effort saving pennies. They will make the circuit board as small as possible, use less gold flashing on connector pins.
This might impact drive reliability.
Still, it is the spinning media that produces a lot of heat mechanical vibrations and the platters and heads have to very close to operate reliability.
Also, a drive has an automatic/smart defect management system — when a defect is found on the media by the controller and software that area is reassigned to a known good location. So defects are not seen by the user. I think what they are referring to in this article to are gross, catastrophic failures.
M4L Hard Drive
I use a drill press.
I thought the innards of a hard drive are in a vacuum. How can humidity play a factor in a vacuum?
As long it is a dry heat.
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