On Sun, 2021-03-28 at 19:30 -0300, George N. White III wrote:
> There have also been efforts to predict eminent drive failure (e.g.,
> using S.M.A.R.T) but without much success.

It took me a moment to wonder what would be famous/respected about
drive failures. ;-)  But I've often wondered if SMART does anything
useful.  If it detects an imminent problem it needs to notify you about
it, and with a warning that's understandable.
 
I used to see system emails like this:

        The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:
        Device: /dev/sdb, 4 Offline uncorrectable sectors
        For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

Which were useful to me, but probably obscure to a lot of people.  That
was on a system with two drives, one in use and one bodgy one for
testing, and the errors never increased over several years.  It was
always consistently telling me that.

I'm recently seeing info like this in logwatch emails:

        **Unmatched Entries**
        Device: /dev/sda [SAT], CHECK POWER STATUS spins up disk (0x81 -> 0xff)

Which makes little sense to me.  The system is a 24/7 server, not often
rebooted.  It's a solid state drive, and I don't know what the hex that
means (pun intended).  I've no idea if that's an error, or if it's just
telling me that drive has changed modes (idle/active).

And I don't know what kind of warnings people get who don't have system
emails anymore.

Logically I'd expect that if SMART thought the drive might need
checking or chucking, it'd start to give me useful warnings ahead of
time, and I might be lucky enough to backup my files before disaster
struck.  But the warnings ain't that useful.  And, of course, it's
entirely possible for a drive to spontaneously fail before any
scheduled SMART test took place.

-- 
 
uname -rsvp
Linux 3.10.0-1160.21.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Mar 16 18:28:22 UTC 2021 x86_64
 
Boilerplate:  All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted.
I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list.
 
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