A deeper dive into disk drive survival time
Evaluating newer classes in the context of historical failure data: Time windowed KM survival curves Background: A substantial proportion of online data and services rely on hard disk drives that form a ubiquitous part of modern information infrastructure, so reliable statistical analysis of differences in failure over time for different disk drive models is of particular interest to those responsible for maintaining storage integity at home or at work. The Backblaze hard disk failure data represent an interesting "big data" analytic opportunity to compare enterprise and consumer hard disk drives over time under real world operating conditions. In this article, some statistical issues are discussed and the results of a some simple analyses are presented. The results provide interesting insight that cannot be obtained by the use of simple descriptive statistics and the statistical tests show that many of the differences observed are important and unlikely to have arisen
