On Wednesday March 26 2008 1:27:45 pm Bruno Wolff III wrote: > > Shouldn't there have been some indication of problems prior > > to the failure? > > Only if you are lucky. Someone at Google published some > information about smart around a year ago. In cases where > catastrophic failures occur, for a high percentage there is no > warning from smart. >From the google hard drive study: ******************************************** Our key findings are: • Contrary to previously reported results, we found very little correlation between failure rates and either elevated temperature or activity levels. • Some SMART parameters (scan errors, reallocation counts, offline reallocation counts, and probational counts) have a large impact on failure probability. • Given the lack of occurrence of predictive SMART signals on a large fraction of failed drives, it is unlikely that an accurate predictive failure model can be built based on these signals alone ***************************************** Their database was in excess of 100,000 hard drives. Details available here: http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf -- Claude Jones Brunswick, MD, USA
