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Comment by conbandit | Hacker News Reader

If you've never found anything with it, why do you keep doing it (see: the definition of insanity)?

Not the parent, but probably because

1. It's notorious that hard drives have a higher failure rate at the beginning of their lives than in the middle (see bathtub curve [0]). So it's not absurd to test them hard early on before writing any useful data and to do an early RMA.

2. The failure rate on drives is low enough that his methodology may be right but he still never has any failure in his life. Doesn't it make insane.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

It would depend on the effort to do the methodology vs. the expected return (savings of finding a failed drive times the probability).

I once bought a new 1TB Drive when they were fairly new. MOVED about 500gb if data to the new drive. Checked it. Seemed fine. Turned computer off and went to bed.

Next day the HDD didn’t turn on. Completely dead. :( I’ve never had a failure since but I backup everything now.

This is a very strange invocation of the definition of insanity.

Apparently, quality assurance should never be a thing.

I have. Last time I bought a bunch of drives for a RAID array, I used the WD utility to test each of them. 1 of the 6 failed the test.

"Failed" as in "with an IO error" as in "got the wrong data back"?

Because if it's the latter, it could've been caused by some other part of IO stack and not necessarily the drive itself.

I believe the WD utility sends a command to the drive so it does a self test. That would eliminate any upper layers issues.

The first time I learned about burnin, it was because the drives for our RAID array showed up three days before we were supposed to start experimenting. Two of the ten were DOA. FED-EX got us replacements in two days. One of those was dead.

So then I started doing math on MTBF and lots of drives and things looked bleak. Just a couple years later MTBF had gone way up and continued to climb for a while after, but at that particular moment it was something like eight months between failure of you had any more drives than we had and just accelerated from there.

   insanity | inˈsanədē |
   noun
   the state of being seriously mentally ill; madness

I'm not sure when the definition of obsessive-compulsive started being used to describe insanity (it's been going on for at least a decade), but I don't like it (and cringe every time I hear someone repeat it).

Me too, one could argue that practicing anything is "doing the same thing over and over expecting different (getting better) results" ================================ I too have switched to HGST thanks to the backblaze stats.

Why do you back up drives if you've never had a failure?

For the same reason you buy fire insurance even though your home has never burned down.

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