[TriLUG] Compliments to David Zeuthen for Disk Utility

[Aaron Joyner]

Google has done a lot of work on attempting to predict hard drive failure
rates.  Based on the published research, it's true that reallocation counts
do correlate with an increase in average failure rate of drives.  A quote
from the paper, "After their first reallocation, drives are over 14 times
more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without reallocation
counts...".  There are some other SMART signals that are interesting as
well, such as scan errors, offline reallocation counts, and probational
counts.  Unfortunately, part of the core conclusion is that "Despite this
high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone
are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures."  That
said, it's one component that should probably warrant closer scrutiny of
that disk and it's performance and behavior in the future.  For more details
and a really interesting read:

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

Aaron S. Joyner


On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 9:47 PM, John Brier <johnbrier at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 7:10 AM, Tim Jowers <timjowers at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I just brought up the "Disk Utility" in Fedora. This is really, really
> good.
> > It actually helps you determine what is wrong with the disks. Seems to me
> > mounting disks vertically (on their side) is a bad idea as I have a
> failing
> > Seagate and a failing Maxtor whereas other disks which I've had
> horizontal
> > (normal mounting) are lasting longer (4+ years). Bad sectors at about 4
> > years.
>
> FWIW a lot of the information (all?) about the SMART status of drives
> can be seen from the command line utility smartctl. One of the most
> important ones is the "Reallocated Sector Count" According to a friend
> of mine it counts as a failure in the drive for most manufacturers and
> indicates that it's starting to die:
>
> http://nordic-pc.com/node/420
>
> I'm the first comment in there, my seagate never got any worse, but I
> could probably RMA it.
>
> I do agree that Disk Utility is pretty bad ass. Looks like Red Hat
> engineers created it. woah I just noticed it creates raid arrays too.
> nice!
>
> JB
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