Conduant Corporation

Predicting Disk Drive Reliability

One of the things that Conduant is consistently asked about is how can the failure of a disk drive be predicted. While disk drive reliability has improved dramatically over the last 20 years, it would obviously be desirable to predict a failure before it occurs.

Disk drive manufacturers (especially IBM) created a system called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis, and Reporting Technology) that was intended to provide just such a mechanism. Unfortunately it has never quite achieved the intended result and failure prediction remains an elusive goal. There are also many myths about disk drive reliability that may or may not be true such as temperature sensitivity and usage patterns effecting drive reliability.

If you are interested in reading more, Google has published a paper describing their research into disk drive failure prediction. You can find that paper here: