Re: unreadable drives can be synchronized?

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Colin McCabe wrote:
> On 5/18/07, Tomasz Chmielewski <mangoo@wpkg.org> wrote:
>> Andrew Burgess schrieb:
>> >> Basically, B appears to be "write-only"; it will never return an 
>> error on a
>> >> write, but just try to read from it, and you will be sorry.
>> >
>> > It would be interesting to see what SMART says about drive B, 
>> especially
>> > the short and long self tests.
>>
>> I wouldn't rely on SMART.
>>
>> I have a broken drive, which has lots of badblocks - but SMART happily
>> claims it's fine (short/long tests are completed without errors).
>>
>
> If you haven't seen Google's hard drive study yet, you should take a 
> look.
> It's at http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
>
> The conclusion says that "some of the SMART parameters are
> well-correlated with higher failure probabilities," but also that "a
> large fraction of [google's] failed drives have shown no SMART error
> signals whatsoever."
Having covered that in a presentation to a user group related to SMART. 
may I offer a paraphrase which may be more obvious to people who are not 
native speakers of English:

High counts of some SMART parameters indicate that the drive is likely 
to fail. However, most drives fail without warning.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979