Fri, 09 Mar 2007
Disk Delving - 2 Good Papers and a Blog
"The Google team found that 36% of the failed drives did not exhibit a single
SMART-monitored failure. They concluded that SMART data is almost useless
for predicting the failure of a single drive."
-- StorageMojo - Google's Disk Failure
Experience
There have been two excellent papers on disk drive failures released recently, the Dugg and Dotted Google paper - Failure trends in a large disk drive population (warning: PDF) and the also excellent but less hyped Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?.
Both papers make very interesting reading, the comparisons of SCSI to SATA disks alone should turn some heads, but they are a little dry, so once you've worked your way through them it's worth looking at the summarised highlights over at StorageMojo, a top notch blog that was recommended to me by Kim Hawtin. StorageMojo covered both papers and I've linked to them in the quotes above and below.
"Further, these results validate the Google File System's central redundancy
concept: forget RAID, just replicate the data three times. If I'm an IT
architect, the idea that I can spend less money and get higher reliability
from simple cluster storage file replication should be very
attractive."
-- StorageMojo - Everything You Know
About Disks Is Wrong
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Posted: 2007/03/09 09:21 | /sysadmin | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sysadmin Challenge - Disk Usage
Here's one for the sysadmins in the crowd; if you were asked to show the
following how long would it take you to gather the information?
- Which of your file systems have the fastest growth rate?
- Which are the most under-utilised?
- Which haven't changed by more than 5% over the last month?
If you use Nagios you can cheat and work out the full drive size from the free space and percentage used reported by the disk checks, but that's... icky. You get bonus points for having prediction built in to your usage graphs.
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Posted: 2007/03/09 08:48 | /sysadmin | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
ls and the Missing Argument
When it comes to command line options GNU ls already uses
most of the alphabet, so for my own sanity can someone implement a
-j that doesn't change the behaviour much from a ls
-alh? It's my most common typo and I'm willing to offer beer to
remove the problem.
I could learn to type better but this is easier ;)
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Posted: 2007/03/09 08:34 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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