On Tue, 28 Apr 2015 21:07:38 +1200, Daniel Lawson wrote:
So SMART is fine for telling you a drive is *not healthy*. On the other hand, SMART is no use at telling you a drive is *healthy*: A clean bill of health today, according to SMART, doesn’t mean the drive won’t catastrophically fail tomorrow. This is the conclusion that the google paper drew, but a lot of people seem to misinterpret it.
This is why I don’t bother with SMART. Sit down and work out the maths: relying on SMART greatly increases your rate of replacement of drives, without a corresponding increase in the reliability of your data.
I’m struggling to understand your reasoning here.
It’s a well-known phenomenon in the mathematics of probability, known as the base-rate fallacy. Remember that people’s intuitions about probability are notoriously misleading. That’s why you have to actually do the maths.