linux-kernel - Re: ZFS with Linux: An Open Plea

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Date:	Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:57:53 -0500
From:	Matt Mackall <mpm@...enic.com>
To:	Valerie Henson <val_henson@...ux.intel.com>
Cc:	Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@...lub.uwaterloo.ca>,
	Tomasz K?oczko <kloczek@...y.mif.pg.gda.pl>,
	Diego Calleja <diegocg@...il.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	Stefan Richter <stefanr@...6.in-berlin.de>,
	Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@...ux01.gwdg.de>,
	Mike Snitzer <snitzer@...il.com>, Neil Brown <neilb@...e.de>,
	"David R. Litwin" <presently42@...il.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: ZFS with Linux: An Open Plea

On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 10:21:02PM -0700, Valerie Henson wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 01:25:19PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > 
> > Does it matter that google's recent report on disk failures indicated
> > that SMART never predicted anything useful as far as they could tell?
> > Certainly none of my drive failures ever had SMART make any kind of
> > indication that anything was wrong.
> 
> I saw that talk, and that's not what I got out of it.  They found that
> SMART error reports _did_ correlate with drive failure.

In fact, a certain small set of SMART indicators were a very good sign
that a drive would fail.

> However, they found that the correlation was not strong enough to make
> it economically feasible to replace disks reporting SMART failures,
> since something like 70% of disks were still working a year after the
> first failure report.  Also, they found that some disks failed without
> any SMART error reports.

Indeed, SMART registered no counts at all for most failures, so on the
whole, it can't be said that SMART can predict failures.

So: not a good idea to base your backup scheme on SMART warnings, but
not entirely useless.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.
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