On Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:28:16 +0100 Florian Philipp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Well, the best thing to do is to post any error messages you have > > here. I googled mine too but still was not sure what to make of the > > info I was getting. It sounded bad so I posted them here. There > > are some serious hardware gurus here and I was sure someone that > > had ran into this before would clarify what was going on for me. > > > > [...] > > > > Dale > > > I recommend reading Google's analysis of SMART and HDD failures: > http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf the interesting part from the conclusions section: One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels. Such correlations have been repeatedly highlighted by previous studies, but we are unable to confirm them by observing our population. Although our data do not allow us to conclude that there is no such correlation, it provides strong evidence to suggest that other effects may be more prominent in affecting disk drive reliability in the context of a professionally managed data center deployment. Our results confirm the findings of previous smaller population studies that suggest that some of the SMART parameters are well-correlated with higher failure probabilities. We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors. First errors in reallocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts are also strongly correlated to higher failure probabilities. Despite those strong correlations, we find that failure prediction models based on SMART parameters alone are likely to be severely limited in their prediction accuracy, given that a large fraction of our failed drives have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever. This result suggests that SMART models are more useful in predicting trends for large aggregate populations than for individual components. It also suggests that powerful predictive models need to make use of signals beyond those provided by SMART. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
