Impact of Environmental Conditions on Reliability of HDDs

Environmental Conditions and Disk Reliability in Free-cooled Datacenters
By Ioannis Manousakis, Rutgers University; Sriram Sankar, GoDaddy; Gregg McKnight, Microsoft; Thu D. Nguyen, Rutgers University; Ricardo Bianchini, Microsoft

This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 14th USENIX Conference on
File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’16), February 22-25, 2016, Santa Clara, CA

In this paper, we studied the impact of environmental conditions on the reliability of disk drives from nine data- centers. We also explored the tradeoffs between environmental conditions, energy consumption, and datacenter costs. Based on these analyses, we proposed and validated a new disk lifetime model that is particularly useful for free-cooled datacenters. Using the model and our data, we derived server and datacenter design lessons. Based on our experience and observations, we conclude that high relative humidity degrades reliability significantly, having a much more substantial impact than temperature or temperature variation. Thus, the design of free-cooled datacenters and their servers must consider the relative humidity to which components are exposed as a first-class issue. Organizations that operate datacenters with different cooling technologies in multiple geographies can select the conditions under which their services strike the right tradeoff between energy consumption, hardware reliability, cost, and QoS.