Re: is this hard disk failure?
On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Miles Fidelman
<mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>>
>> For me a hard disc never gets broken without click-click-click noise
>> before it failed, but it's very common that cables and connections fail.
>>
>>
>
> By the time a disk gets to the click-click-click phase, there has been LOTS
> of warning - it's just that today's disks include lots of internal
> fault-recovery mechanisms that hide things from you, unless you run SMART
> diagnostics (and not just the basic "smart status" either).
This is not borne out by my experience, or Google's white paper on the
subject in 2007. See this study
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/disk_failures.pdf
The upshot is that "smart" monitoring is nowhere near 100% reliable,
you're lucky if it catches even half of your drive failures in time to
do anything besides rely on backups or rely on the rest of your RAID.
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