Hidden Costs of Digital Smart Home

Let’s start with a little Math. Most of us have a hard-drive. In your Desktop, Laptop, iPad, Mobile Phone, it doesn’t matter. Each of those drives has a probability of failure. It’s different for the age of the drive, how often you dropped your Laptop, how often you kicked your desktop. But lets assume that a drive has a probability of 1% to fail within this year. That’s not too bad.

But here’s the thing, you don’t have one drive. You have quite a few. And I’m a device hoarder. I have currently 44 SD cards/SSDs/M2s/HDDs that are attached to my fleet of raspberrys/odroids/bananapis. On top of that we have a desktop, 3 Laptops, a crazy high number of tablets, a few mobile phones, a smart tv and a few Alexa’s plus a fire-tv stick. The network itself is managed by 5 routers which create multiple network zones. But for simplicity, let’s just say I have 50 hard-drives.

If we assume that a drive has 1% probability of failure, that means it has a 99% probability of survival. The probability of all drives surviving this year is thus 99%^50=60.5%. Or, to put it the other way round, the probability of one them failing is roughly 40%.

Why am I telling you that? Well, one just failed. Luckily it was one of the two in the desktop, and they are setup as RAID1 (both drives have all the data), and once I added the new drive all data will be mirrored again. If the other drive doesn’t crash in between, nothing is lost. But it’s operating. Time I have to invest to figure what has happened, search for a new drive, order it, switch it, making sure it works.

And the hard drive is only one component of each device that can fail.

It’s actually similar to my past experiences I had with running a datacenter. If you compare the probability of failure of the drives in datacenter racks with your own consumer drives, you’ll notice that they are far more durable. Still, in a datacenter you have billions of them. And so it’s a full day job to operate them.

My home is transforming more and more into a full time job as well. In the last year, the following components have failed and needed replacement: two routers, the fire-tv stick, an iPad, a few arduinos (some of those however because I’m really really bad at soldering and avoid short circuits…), 3 raspberries, and named hard drive. On top of that, things misbehave once in a while. The printer wouldn’t print, the raspberry+display no longer reacts to touch events, the wifi collapses, kids unplug dsl router/homecloud/running computers because they need the power for their tablets. My wife got herself some ransomware, on or our remote control light no longer reacts to the remote control, and the movement detector of the kid’s nightlight started to fail. And let’s not talk about the time the hosepipe of the automated watering for the garden broke while we were on vacation.

And all of those things have to be fixed. Maintained. Operated. Updated. Turned off and on again.

I’m a software developer with Operations Background, and I know how to manage a fleet of devices. And still it is keeping me busy. And we are slowing going in a direction where we are bringing more and more devices into our home. How will people manage a future with a smart home of 1000 devices, given that the probability that all their drives survive this year is 99%^1000=0.0043%?

And the hard drive is only one component of each device that can fail.