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by james_cowling 1122 days ago
Yeah we have a few talks about this and a chapter about this very issue in https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/seeking-sre/97814919788.... Totally agree that in a well designed system the sources of data loss are certainly not disk failures.

As far as I know Magic Pocket has had 100% durability, but that's obviously beside the point.

1 comments

"It’s fairly easy to design a system with astronomically high durability numbers. 24 nines is a mean time to failure of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. When your MTTF dwarfs the age of the universe then it might be time to reevaluate your priorities.

Should we trust these numbers though? Of course not, because the secret truth is that adherence to theoretical durability estimates is missing the point. They tell you how likely you are to lose data due to routine disk failure, but routine disk failure is easy to model for and protect against. If you lose data due to routine disk failure you’re probably doing something wrong."

https://medium.com/@jamesacowling/how-many-nines-is-my-stora...