Reliability analysis of disk drive failure mechanisms

Reliability analyses are performed on the field failure data of various drive families from different drive manufacturers to gain insight into the nature of the underlying failure mechanisms and their contribution to the overall failure rate of the disk drive. The effect of various disk drive firmware changes implemented throughout the operating life of the disk drive and the capacity dependent failure mechanisms are studied in detail. The results obtained from the analysis of three disk drive families shows that a top-level failure rate analysis is not adequate to understand and improve the reliability of disk drives.