[mythtv-users] OT: Interesting study on HDD failure by Google labs

[John Drescher]

> "[...] We find, for example, that after their first [SMART] scan
> error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than
> drives with no such errors. [...] 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 error signals
> whatsoever."
>
At work (where dozens of drives have died before retiring them) we
have not had smart ever warn us of a drive about to die and smart is
enabled on most of our drives and systems. When we were lucky we were
able to hear the drive acting up and catch it in time to make a copy
of the drive but this probably will be harder since drives are a lot
quieter now then they were 3 years ago. This along with the reduced
quality of current drives (compared to when they were > $300US) has
made me install raid5 or 6 on all my servers.

John