Catastrophic disk failure, where was smartd?

[Claude Jones]

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:
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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
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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