>> Well, a good start is to use something like SMART monitoring set up to
>> alert you when any drive enters what it considers a pre-fail state.
>> (Which can be simple age, increasing numbers of hard errors, increasing
>> variation in spindle speed, increasing slow starts, etc, etc...)
>
> FWIW: Nexan, Xyratec and Infortrend all have SMART tracking disabled on
> their hardware arrays because they claim it usually only says a drive is
> on its way out a few hours after it died.
>

I would say this is true for smart PASS / FAIL but if you look at the
raw SMART data you can use this to predict failure before it totally
fails. At least I have been able to predict this for the 10 to 20
drives that have died here at work since 2009. I usually know a week
or so before a drive is going to die and I pull the drive from the
raid for further testing. And what I mean as further testing is I do a
4 pass badblocks  read / write test looking at the SMART raw data
before and after.

John

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