Google Engineers Go Geek on Hard Drives

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Monday, February 19th, 2007


After using hundreds of thousands of hard drives in their quest for world domination, Google knows a thing or two about spinning platters. All of their hard work has been distilled into one academic paper describing correlations between hard drive age, manufacturer, and data density.

The most interesting finding? SMART, the system used to test hard drives for imminent failure, is all but worthless and there is no direct correlation between active usage and potential failure.

Google Labs [via SlashDot]

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