Ask HN: Increased HD failures after Taiwan floods?

Hello,

one of the side-effects of the massive floods in Thailand last October was a shortage in hard drives. HD prices went up as stocks dwindled.

The plants cleaned up and restarted production but such bootstrap events often brings with them elevated failure rates. In electronics manufacturing it normally takes anywhere from 6 months to 2 years before quality is back on track.

According to a Google study(1), HD failures are most notable in the first 3 months of usage.

My question: did you encounter abnormal HD failures in the past months for new drives in your professional/home setups?

Thanks!

(1) http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

1 comment

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Piskvorrr 14y ago ↗

Taiwan, Thailand, Tokio - same thing, right?

As for the question: not yet. First, I suppose the drives I'd buy right now, especially in prebuilt computers, might still be antediluvian (given the latency between manufacture, assembly and retail - I'll check the S/Ns on my new computer when I get to it); second, even if they were, most of my early HD failures (two out of three - not very many data points, there) were somewhere around the 1 year mark, so this wouldn't manifest yet.

So, there's a lot of variables in play here - IMNSHO saying that drives failing now are result of last October's flood would smell of the post-hoc fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc