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by Tadpole9181 23 days ago
If they want to avoid confounding variables to real world use, this could take years. Nobody wants to wait years after an innovation to sell their product, so they develop ways to speed up the testing and get a number.

A machine that presses a keyboard switch 500 times a second for several days straight is obviously not indicative of someone actually using the keyboard. But it'll get the "absolutely beat the snot out of it" number, which is usually good enough for marketing.
1 comments
rsync 23 days ago
No, it doesn't take years and the testing is performed, roughly, as I just described it.

They build a test rig with 10,000 drives which they run continuously producing a total "drive hours" count and then wait for the first one or two or ten drives to fail.

X failures / 10,000,000 drive-hours will give you your MTBF, etc. ... and only takes ~40 days given a 10k drive test rig.

Some pictures from Seagate lab in Longmont:

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/yHqDagRDz9H5koWBefi24K-120...

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/EiZ9tA6p3UbaJFTaW75JdN.jpg

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Tadpole9181 22 days ago
Yes, this is one of the hacks they use that are fundamentally inaccurate due to confounding variables like bathtub curves and different issues causing early failures and long-term failures...

Because, otherwise, they would need to run those drives for years and years with reasonable cycling and read/write pressure to report accurate numbers based on real world failure rates in real conditions.

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