Originally Posted By: mlord
Mechanical drives seldom die outright without warning.

Sorry, Mark, but I'm calling bullshit on this one. Drives die suddenly all the time. I have seldom had any useful warning that a drive was about to go bad, from SMART to small errors. The vast majority of them just up and die.

Google's experience is not as extreme as mine, but it still belies your claim:

Originally Posted By: Google
Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count. In other words, models based only on those signals can never predict more than half of the failed drives. Figure 14 shows that even when we add all remaining SMART parameters (except temperature) we still find that over 36% of all failed drives had zero counts on all variables.
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Bitt Faulk