Zero-Maintenance Disk Arrays

We present a disk array architecture that does not require users to perform any maintenance tasks over the expected lifetime of the array. Preliminary results indicate that the key factor in the feasibility of our design is the failure rate of unused spare disks. As long as these rates remain negligible, zero maintenance disk arrays with at least 77 disks can provide a five-year reliability of five nines (99.999 percent) with a space overhead comparable to that of mirroring. If this is not the case, we would need between 64 and 70 percent extra spare disks to achieve the same five-year reliability, which would result in a higher space overhead.