StorageMojo - Open Letter to Seagate, Hitachi GST, EMC, HP, NetApp, IBM and Sun

"The papers suggested that important assumptions about disks, and by implication, arrays, are wrong - and not just a little.

• Failure rates are several times higher than reported by drive companies.
  
• Actual MTBFs (or AFRs) of “enterprise” and “consumer” drives are much pretty much the same.
  
• Drive failure rates rise steadily with age rather than staying flat through some n-year mark.
  
• SMART is not a reliable predictor of drive failure.
  
• Array disk failures are highly correlated, making RAID 5 two to four times less safe than assumed."