What are the odds of 20 hard drives failing at once?

[JimBowie1958]

Say we have 20 people all involved in the same fantasy football league. Each has data backed up for the entire league making, they think, the data guaranteed to be safe from loss.

But one Monday as they go to look at their standings after a particularly interesting Sunday, and all of them find that their hard drives have crashed and they cant access any of the data.

One of the players, Steve is a well known hacker who could have pulled some shenanigans, perhaps, but he insists that he did nothing to cause the failure as his team was victorious. Another player, Doug, had a disastrous weekend, but he does not have the skill to cause anything like this. Ted says that Doug hired Steve to crash the hard drives. Bob says that sometimes shit happens, maybe all twenty crashed simultaneously.

Who is most likely right?

 

[SteadyMercury]

0%

 

[blastoff]

Depends on who takes the 5th.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Harddrives have ratings for expected loss of data integrity measured as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF.) Modern harddrives have MTBFs in the millions of hours of continuous power on. So the odds of 20 harddrives all failing at the same time is:

MTBF x MTBf x MTBF... times 17 more. In other words, as with top tier hd comanies like Western Digital with MTBFs of 1 million hours, the chances of 20 drives faling at the same time is once per life age of the Earth. Or there abouts.

Being a nerd I had to work this out. A million hours is over 114 years. So 114 x 114...is oh I was way off. Just to the 10th hd the number was older than the universe already so...

 

[ogibillm]

Harddrives have ratings for expected loss of data integrity measured as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF.) Modern harddrives have MTBFs in the millions of hours of continuous power on. So the odds of 20 harddrives all failing at the same time is:

MTBF x MTBf x MTBF... times 17 more. In other words, as with top tier hd comanies like Western Digital with MTBFs of 1 million hours, the chances of 20 drives faling at the same time is once per life age of the Earth. Or there abouts.

that's not how it works.

 

[rightwinger]

I would guess 50-50 or less

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Harddrives have ratings for expected loss of data integrity measured as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF.) Modern harddrives have MTBFs in the millions of hours of continuous power on. So the odds of 20 harddrives all failing at the same time is:

MTBF x MTBf x MTBF... times 17 more. In other words, as with top tier hd comanies like Western Digital with MTBFs of 1 million hours, the chances of 20 drives faling at the same time is once per life age of the Earth. Or there abouts.

that's not how it works.

And green's a better color than blue.

Can say things like that all we like, but if we don't then explain why we should remain silent.

 

[ogibillm]

Harddrives have ratings for expected loss of data integrity measured as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF.) Modern harddrives have MTBFs in the millions of hours of continuous power on. So the odds of 20 harddrives all failing at the same time is:

MTBF x MTBf x MTBF... times 17 more. In other words, as with top tier hd comanies like Western Digital with MTBFs of 1 million hours, the chances of 20 drives faling at the same time is once per life age of the Earth. Or there abouts.

that's not how it works.

And green's a better color than blue.

Can say things like that all we like, but if we don't then explain why we should remain silent.

well what you've done is multiply the mean times before failure and believed that it would give you a probability, or even a time until failure of 20 independently, simultaneously operating hard drives.

it just doesn't work like that.

 

[Pennywise]

The American media is an abomination. That's the answer.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

"Tore, Feldman, O'Reilly, Nelson... That's an Italian, a Jew, an Irishman and a regular American. That's what I call a balanced ticket."

-Archie Bunker

Isn't 'Nelson' a British name? British, American, ya that's roughly equal (rolls eyes)

 

[Pennywise]

"Tore, Feldman, O'Reilly, Nelson... That's an Italian, a Jew, an Irishman and a regular American. That's what I call a balanced ticket."

-Archie Bunker

Isn't 'Nelson' a British name? British, American, ya that's roughly equal (rolls eyes)

Do you dare question Archie?

 

[BobPlumb]

What is the probability that anyone would be looking on individual's hard drives for emails anyway?

 

[daws101]

it's called a bad batch..my guess is the hard drive were about the same age and from the same manufacturer...

 

[Sgt_Gath]

Say we have 20 people all involved in the same fantasy football league. Each has data backed up for the entire league making, they think, the data guaranteed to be safe from loss.

But one Monday as they go to look at their standings after a particularly interesting Sunday, and all of them find that their hard drives have crashed and they cant access any of the data.

One of the players, Steve is a well known hacker who could have pulled some shenanigans, perhaps, but he insists that he did nothing to cause the failure as his team was victorious. Another player, Doug, had a disastrous weekend, but he does not have the skill to cause anything like this. Ted says that Doug hired Steve to crash the hard drives. Bob says that sometimes shit happens, maybe all twenty crashed simultaneously.

Who is most likely right?

Haxz

 

[boedicca]

The odds are 100% when one factors in the fact that this was part of a cover up attempt.

 

[R.C. Christian]

At the server level, hard drives will show predictive failures and send an alert to the administrator to replace on a RAID system.

Crashed drives on a laptop are completely irrelevant since everything is backed up to the cloud or some other medium.

Not to mention the fact that these servers have redundant nodes to fail over to in a disaster situation.

 

[Bush92]

Complete scandal. But, it's Obama and Democrats so any illegal activity is possible.

 

[Asclepias]

it's called a bad batch..my guess is the hard drive were about the same age and from the same manufacturer...

You beat me to it. That or all of them were too stupid to protect their HDD's

 

[JimBowie1958]

What is the probability that anyone would be looking on individual's hard drives for emails anyway?

Not emails, FANTASY FOOTBALL LEAGUE STATS.

Where do you get this email thing from?

Sounds like you have your own little fantasy story.

 

[JimBowie1958]

At the server level, hard drives will show predictive failures and send an alert to the administrator to replace on a RAID system.

Crashed drives on a laptop are completely irrelevant since everything is backed up to the cloud or some other medium.

Not to mention the fact that these servers have redundant nodes to fail over to in a disaster situation.

That's a bit top end for a fantasy football league.