Ken writes
...
[a nice report!]
...
> One possible suggestion was
> Annualized Failure Rate (AFR), which is a cumulative measurement of
> disk drives working over time compared to the number of drives that have
> failed so far.
...
> The AFR for the Coyote IV drive is 3.6% and for the Wolverine III is 3.8%.
 
Does that mean that 3.6% of all Coyotes and 3.8% of all Wolverine IIIs have
failed (each year)?
 
> Some
> may use a figure of their disks only running 12 hours or 16 hours a day but
> DMD uses a figure of 24 hours a day usage.  If HP used 12 hours a day
> instead of 24 these AFR numbers would be cut in half.  He also brought up
 
Sounds strange ... I suspect that if a disk drive manufacturer tried to
quote numbers based on running a drive 12 hours a day, they'd be laughed
out of the marketplace (at least, for minis, superminis, and mainframes,
where the disks spin 24 hours a day).
 
> but they have very different ways of acheiving them.  If a disk drive
> replacement is necessary than utilities need to be available that will
> facilitate the transfer of data from a bad drive to a good one and do it in a
> more timely fashion than is currently available.
...
 
<plug>
That's one reason De-Frag/x (from Lund Performance Solutions) has a
"CLONEdisk" command:
 
  CLONEdisk source_ldev# TO destination_ldev#  [ALLOWbigger]
 
      The CLONEDISK command copies every byte of data from the
      source disk drive to the destination (TO ldev#) disk drive.
</plug>
 
There is also an HP offline tool that can clone disk drives, but I forget
the name.
 
--
Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html