Ask HN: How does Mean Time Between Failure make sense?

2 pointsdusted5 comments

I'm reading the MBTF on a SkyHawk harddisk is 1 million hours, there's about 8765 hours in a year, so the mean time before failure for this drive is.... 1.000.000 / 8765 = about 114 years ?

That's obviously wrong, so how am I to understand this number? They take a million drives and run them for one hour with 0 drives dying within that hour?

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"...which might lead one to conclude that the specification promises between 30 and 120 years of continuous operation. This is not the case! The specification is based on a large (statistically significant) number of drives running continuously at a test site, with data extrapolated according to various known statistical models to yield the results."

https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/support/kb/hard-disk-drive-rel...

Congratulations. Not only do you not define the acronym you’re asking about, you also kick the letters when you repeat it in your summary.

Mean Time Between Failure

I thought mean time between failure was a very common term, apologies.

Can you fix your use of “MBTF”?

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