Systems design notes

Failure mode

Basically, "the way in which the thing fails"

Closely related to its causes.

Often brought up in a "what's the worst thing that can happen, and how do we deal with that?" sense - see also fail-safe

For example, platter hard drives may

• fail electronically
• fail mechanically
• have detectable bad sectors
• have undetectable corruption

The term might appear in a sentence mentioning that RAID can only deal with some of these failure modes.