On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 7:02 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerar...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Am 13.11.2014 um 01:01 schrieb Adam Carter: > > "Backblaze's analysis of nearly 40,000 drives showed five SMART metrics that > correlate strongly with impending disk drive failure: > > SMART 5 - Reallocated_Sector_Count. > SMART 187 - Reported_Uncorrectable_Errors. > SMART 188 - Command_Timeout. > SMART 197 - Current_Pending_Sector_Count. > SMART 198 - Offline_Uncorrectable" > > http://www.computerworld.com/article/2846009/the-5-smart-stats-that-actually-predict-hard-drive-failure.html > > > everybody with half a brain would figure that one out themselves. ...
It is still useful data nonetheless. The fact that other factors were not correlated is interesting in and of itself. The difference between a good hypothesis and a good theory is data. There aren't a lot of published accounts of drive reliability across large sample sizes of any kind, so this stuff is useful. Sure, it would be really nice if somebody bought a million drives at random, removed the labels and modified the internal vendor identifiers, distributed them to three independent academic testing labs, and performed a series of double-blind tests for a span of 5 years. But, since nobody seems willing to just spend that kind of money for the good of mankind, we can at least read accounts by companies like Google/Backblaze/etc when they publish them. -- Rich
