The MTTF Analysis of Multiple-Disk System with General Repair Time Distribution

The reliability of the multiple-disk system is degraded as the number of disks are increased. In this paper, we find the reliability, in terms of MTTF (Mean Time To Failure)of the single-disk-failure-tolerant disk systems in which the distributions of repair times of failed disk are heterogeneous and general. Also, we derive thresholds of the design parameters such as the mean of life time and repair time, and we consider the cost minimization problem in the special cases under a linear cost structure and constraints to the life of the disk system.