Comment by jumpmanjr

I applied Bendord’s law against hard drive bad block addresses across 20,000 enterprise storage arrays that called home. In theory, drive bad block LBAs should map perfectly to Benford’s distribution. In our system, there were a number of anomalies. Digging in further, I discovered that the engineeers periodically had the drives seek to a certain location, and write a status block. This happened frequently enough that it interrupted the drives internal “swirl” algorithm that was developed to keep the head from carving a “canyon” into the medium. At a microscopic level, our drives looked like the Grand Canyon.