<html><head></head><body>The obvious analogy that for obvious reasons* won't have occurred to you: cars. If you don't get a lemon, it's probably good for a while, but eventually starts to break down.<br>
Also, historically, humans - at least in ages and places where infant mortality is/was a significant drag on population growth.<br>
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-Adam<br>
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*for those of you who don't know Trevor well, his 25(?)-year-old car is lovingly & painstakingly maintained in near-new condition.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On September 3, 2014 2:10:53 PM CDT, Trevor Cordes <trevor@tecnopolis.ca> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail">OK, so you know how many (most?) computer components' failure rates<br />follow the "bathtub curve":<br /><br /><a href="http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/des_s99/sw_reliability/Image1.gif">http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/des_s99/sw_reliability/Image1.gif</a><br /><br />They either die quickly due to egregious manufacturing faults, or live<br />a long time (near 0% failure rate), and then all start dying as they get<br />really old.<br /><br />The bathtub curve occurs in tons of places, like with a simple light<br />bulb.<br /><br />As per my experience (probably dealing with over 1000 drives<br />personally), and google's studies, as well as anecdotal information,<br />hard drives are different. The failure rate seems to be bathtub-ish.<br />The initial failure rate is fairly bathtub. But the useful-life period<br />is at a much higher level and seems to grow slightly, meaning instead<br />of dropping to near-zero failures during useful life, they drop to<br
/>around 15% failure rate each year, mostly independent of age. Then,<br />in the old-age phase they seem to ramp up much slower towards death.<br />It's not a hockey-stick right edge, it's more a constant gentle hill<br />slope. We all have seen many drives that are still running after 8,<br />10, 20 years. In fact, it seems more of a survival of the fittest<br />system (maybe like turtles?), where once they live to a certain age,<br />many go on to live far beyond the average.<br /><br />Anyhow, my question is, what else in the non-computer world has a<br />failure graph like hard drives? Something easy for a neophyte to grasp.<br />Normal bathtubs have lightbulbs. What analogy can be used for hard<br />drives? I haven't been able to think of any!<br /><br />Surely there must be one??<br /><hr /><br />Roundtable mailing list<br />Roundtable@muug.mb.ca<br /><a href="http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable">http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable</a><br
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