: Dean S. Messing wrote: : > I have also discovered "smartctl" and have read that if the short smartctl : > tests are run daily and the long test weekly that the chances of being : > caught "with my pants down" are quite low, even in a two disk RAID-0 : > config. What is your opinion? : > : : There's a good paper on using smartctl to predict the health of disks, : and if you can't find it I probably have a copy somewhere, since I gave : a presentation on RAID issues which included it. But the basic premise : was that if you see errors of certain types, the drives are likely to : fail soon. It did *not* say that absent these warnings the drives were : unlikely to fail, un fact most drives which did fail did so without : warning. So for about 90% of the failures there is no warning. : : I had servers a few years ago, running 6TB/server, on lots of small fast : drives, and I concluded that the predictive value of SMART was so small : that it didn't justify looking at the reports. Take that as my opinion, : assume that drives fail without warning. >From what you and another poster said (about the False Alarm rate of Smartctl) I'll put my trust in backups, alone. I agree: if it predicts such a low % of failures, there's no point to waste time reading the reports and having a false sense of security. : I'm getting around to replying to several things you have said in : various posts, so that people who are threading answers will be happy... I'll look forward to your comments, especially on my misconceptions. I've learned a great deal already. Dean - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
