An analysis of latent sector errors in disk drives

ABSTRACT

The reliability measures in today's disk drive-based storage systems focus predominantly on protecting against complete disk failures. Previous disk reliability studies have analyzed empirical data in an attempt to better understand and predict disk failure rates. Yet, very little is known about the incidence of latent sector errors i.e., errors that go undetected until the corresponding disk sectors are accessed.

Our study analyzes data collected from production storage systems over 32 months across 1.53 million disks (both nearline and enterprise class). We analyze factors that impact latent sector errors, observe trends, and explore their implications on the design of reliability mechanisms in storage systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of such large scale our sample size is at least anorder of magnitude larger than previously published studies and the first one to focus specifically on latent sector errors and their implications on the design and reliability of storage systems.

REFERENCES

• 1: Bruce Allen, Monitoring hard disks with smart, Linux Journal, v.2004 n.117, p.9, January 2004
• 2: Dave Anderson , Jim Dykes , Erik Riedel, More Than an Interface---SCSI vs. ATA, Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, March 31-31, 2003, San Francisco, CA
• 3: Eitan Bachmat , Jiri Schindler, Analysis of methods for scheduling low priority disk drive tasks, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems, June 15-19, 2002, Marina Del Rey, California
• 4: Mary Baker , Mehul Shah , David S. H. Rosenthal , Mema Roussopoulos , Petros Maniatis , TJ Giuli , Prashanth Bungale, A fresh look at the reliability of long-term digital storage, Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2006, April 18-21, 2006, Leuven, Belgium
• 5: Peter Corbett , Bob English , Atul Goel , Tomislav Grcanac , Steven Kleiman , James Leong , Sunitha Sankar, Awarded Best Paper! -- Row-Diagonal Parity for Double Disk Failure Correction, Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, March 31-31, 2004, San Francisco, CA
• 6: J. G. Elerath and S. Shah. Server class disk drives: how reliable are they. IEEE Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, p. 151--156, Jan. 2004.
• 7: J. Gray and C. van Ingen. Empirical measurements of disk failure rates and error rates. MSR-TR-2005-166. Microsoft Research, Dec. 2005.
• 8: James Lee Hafner , Veera Deenadhayalan , K. K. Rao , John A. Tomlin, Matrix methods for lost data reconstruction in erasure codes, Proceedings of the 4th conference on USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, p.14-14, December 13-16, 2005, San Francisco, CA
• 9: Marshall K. McKusick , William N. Joy , Samuel J. Leffler , Robert S. Fabry, A fast file system for UNIX, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.2 n.3, p.181-197, Aug. 1984 [doi>10.1145/989.990]
• 10: Network Appliance Inc. Introduction to Data ONTAP 7G. TR 3356, Network Appliance Inc. Oct. 2005.
• 11: David A. Patterson , Garth Gibson , Randy H. Katz, A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID), Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.109-116, June 01-03, 1988, Chicago, Illinois, United States
• 12: Eduardo Pinheiro , Wolf-Dietrich Weber , Luiz André Barroso, Failure trends in a large disk drive population, Proceedings of the 5th conference on USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, p.2-2, February 13-16, 2007, San Jose, CA
• 13: F. I. Popovici, A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau. Robust, portable I/O scheduling with the disk mimic. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, p. 297--310, Jun. 2003.
• 14: Vijayan Prabhakaran , Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram , Nitin Agrawal , Haryadi S. Gunawi , Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau , Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, IRON file systems, Proceedings of the twentieth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, October 23-26, 2005, Brighton, United Kingdom
• 15: H. Reiser. ReiserFS. http://www.namesys.com/.
• 16: Steven W. Schlosser , Jiri Schindler , Stratos Papadomanolakis , Minglong Shao , Anastassia Ailamaki , Christos Faloutsos , Gregory R. Ganger, On multidimensional data and modern disks, Proceedings of the 4th conference on USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, p.17-17, December 13-16, 2005, San Francisco, CA
• 17: Bianca Schroeder , Garth A. Gibson, Disk failures in the real world: what does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?, Proceedings of the 5th conference on USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, p.1-1, February 13-16, 2007, San Jose, CA
• 18: Thomas J. E. Schwarz , Qin Xin , Ethan L. Miller , Darrell D. E. Long , Andy Hospodor , Spencer Ng, Disk Scrubbing in Large Archival Storage Systems, Proceedings of the The IEEE Computer Society's 12th Annual International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems (MASCOTS'04), p.409-418, October 04-08, 2004
• 19: S. Shah and J. G. Elerath. Disk drive vintage and its effect on reliability. IEEE Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, p. 163--167, Jan. 2004.
• 20: S. Shah and J. G. Elerath. Reliability analyses of disk drive failure mechanisms. IEEE Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, p. 226--231, Jan. 2005.
• 21: Muthian Sivathanu , Vijayan Prabhakaran , Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau , Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, Awarded Best Student Paper! -- Improving Storage System Availability with D-GRAID, Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, March 31-31, 2004, San Francisco, CA
• 22: Nisha Darshi Talagala , David Patterson, Characterizing large storage systems: error behavior and performance benchmarks, University of California, Berkeley, 1999
• 23: Information Technology: SCSI primary commands (SPC-2). T10 Revision 5, Project 1236-D. Sept. 1998.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Reliability, availability, and serviceability

General Terms:
Measurement, Reliability

Keywords:
MTTDL, disk drive reliability, latent sector errors