There’s a paper on getting RAID reliability with up to 3% HDD failure rates. comments Gordon Hughes, perhaps in response to this Storage Insider column.I wrote it based on my experience that field failure rates are this high, after the infant reliability demonstrated by the drive makers. (0.7% AFR is based on just a few months of testing a few thousand drives of a new model. This testing removes the infant mortality part of the FAR bathtub curve, as the CMU FAST paper shows.) Years ago, Net App showed 3% AFR data on their SCSI drive arrays.For an explananion of those acronyms please see Gordon’s paper. My paper is: “Reliability and Security of RAID Storage Systems and D2D Archives using SATA Disk Drives” ACM Transactions on Storage, December 2004. Very interesting reading, while sipping a cup of java or two. At the end of that paper Gordon suggests further studies from which: A class of “Enterprise SATA” drives might emerge, still allowing the high SATA drive capacities at acceptable costwhich is exactly what happened. Happy reading!