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

[Dewey Smolka]

I know this is way off topic, but considering how Myth users tend to
push their drives much harder than the general population I thought
people here would appreciate it.

This is a 13-page article from Google labs looking at a large sample
of HDDs and analyzing (among other things) factors invlolved in disc
failure, SMART monitoring, and using SMART for predictive analysis.
There is a lot of technical detail, and lots of pretty graphs.

An interesting bit from the Conclusion:

"[...] 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."

All in all, a thorough and well-written study by a group that probably
has more drives to look after than anyone else on the planet. Thanks
to Google for making this study public.

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf