Google has issued a report on the problem of Hard Drive failures. The search engine giant studied a hundred thousand SATA and PATA drives with between 80 and 400GB storage and 5400 to 7200rpm. Google uses cheap, off the shelf drives as means to store site and search data throughout the many global data centers.

Engadget reports the summary:

While unfortunately they didn't call out specific brands or models that had high failure rates, they did find a few interesting patterns in failing hard drives.

One of those we thought was most intriguing was that drives often needed replacement for issues that SMART drive status polling didn't or couldn't determine, and 56% of failed drives did not raise any significant SMART flags (and that's interesting, of course, because SMART exists solely to survey hard drive health).

Other notable patterns showed that failure rates are indeed definitely correlated to drive manufacturer, model, and age; failure rates did not correspond to drive usage except in very young and old drives