On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 10:21:02PM -0700, Valerie Henson wrote: > On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 01:25:19PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > > > > Does it matter that google's recent report on disk failures indicated > > that SMART never predicted anything useful as far as they could tell? > > Certainly none of my drive failures ever had SMART make any kind of > > indication that anything was wrong. > > I saw that talk, and that's not what I got out of it. They found that > SMART error reports _did_ correlate with drive failure.
In fact, a certain small set of SMART indicators were a very good sign that a drive would fail. > However, they found that the correlation was not strong enough to make > it economically feasible to replace disks reporting SMART failures, > since something like 70% of disks were still working a year after the > first failure report. Also, they found that some disks failed without > any SMART error reports. Indeed, SMART registered no counts at all for most failures, so on the whole, it can't be said that SMART can predict failures. So: not a good idea to base your backup scheme on SMART warnings, but not entirely useless. -- Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
