Systems design notes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
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.