Computer scientists have devised a way to make conventional memory discs 99.999 per cent reliable over a 4-year lifespan.
The cost of hard drive data storage has fallen dramatically in recent years. In 2008, this kind of memory cost around $0.11 per gigabyte. Today it costs around $0.04 and prices continue to drop. That’s having a significant impact on the way storage centres view their costs because the price of replacing disks when they fail is increasingly dominated by the cost of the service call itself.
Jehan-François Pâris at the University of Houston in Texas and a few pals say they have developed a way to eliminate the cost of service calls by creating data storage that is so reliable that it would not require any human intervention throughout its whole lifetime.
Their trick for making zero maintenance data storage is to include enough spare discs to take on the data from any that fail. “We propose to reduce the maintenance cost of disks arrays by building self-repairing arrays that contain enough spare disks to operate without any human intervention during their whole lifetime,” they say. And the team has simulated the behaviour of such a system and say it outperforms current data redundancy systems.
The most commonly used data storage technology is called RAID (redundant array of independent disks). The most advanced incarnation, called level 6, consists of a set of data discs that are constantly checked against a smaller set of parity discs. That ensures that the data is redundant and can be recreated should the discs fail.
