SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Abstract
Modern storage systems orchestrate a group of disks to achieve their performance and reliability goals. Even though such systems are designed to withstand the failure of individual disks, failure of multiple disks poses a unique set of challenges. We empirically investigate disk failure data from a large number of production systems, specifically focusing on the impact of disk failures on RAID storage systems. Our data covers about one million SATA disks from 6 disk models for periods up to 5 years. We show how observed disk failures weaken the protection provided by RAID. The count of reallocated sectors correlates strongly with impending failures.
Learning Objectives
Empirical investigation of hard disk failures in production systems
Proactive protection of individual disk drives
Proactive protection of RAID storage system
Deployment results of the proactive protection in production system