Google research on disk failure

c.f. Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

Some interested conclusions are made by this paper:

1. Higher temperature drives do not necessarily give higher failure rate.
2. Higher utilization of drives do not necessarily give higher failure rate.
3. Some parameters of SMART do give some indication for potential failures, e.g. after their first scan errors, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days, than drives with no such errors.
4. However, SMART prediction models are limited.  Many drives that fail did not give SMART signals.