

Ask HN: Increased HD failures after Taiwan floods? - toemetoch

Hello,<p>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.<p>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.<p>According to a Google study(1), HD failures are most notable in the first 3 months of usage.<p><i>My question</i>: did you encounter abnormal HD failures in the past months for new drives in your professional/home setups?<p>Thanks!<p>(1) http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf
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Piskvorrr
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>

