Catastrophic disk failure, where was smartd?

[Bob Kinney]

--- Tom Horsley <tom.horsley at att.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:35:49 -0500
> "David G. Mackay" <mackay_d at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> 
> > Shouldn't there have been some indication of problems prior to the
> > failure?
> 
> I have a feeling smartd is quite a lot like the emergency lights
> we have at work. They come on fine when you press the "test" button,
> but if the power actually goes out, they don't work at all :-).
> 
> Most UPS boxes seem to be about the same. They'll be reporting
> self test OK and lots of battery life, then the power actually
> fails, and they fall over dead.
> 
> 


Perhaps S.M.A.R.T. never mentioned a problem.

Unfortunately, there is no reliable indicator of imminent destruction.
S.M.A.R.T. was born to make an attempt at failure prediction, through
statistical analysis of certain performance factors.  While this might
work alright for a relatively long, slow descent into oblivion, it cannot 
possibly foresee a catastrophic sudden mechanical failure.

Google published an extensive study on the topic of disk failures.
Check this out:

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




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