Drive failure prediction techniques for disk drives

摘要

Method for predicting an imminent failure of a disk drive. A plurality of attributes are selected for monitoring during operation of the disk drive. These attributes may include self-preserving attributes, performance attributes, error rate attributes, and even count attributes. An initial value is determined for each one of the selected attributes. A threshold value is then selected for each of the attributes. The disk drive is then monitored for occurrences of the self-preserving, performance, error rate and event count attributes. Each time an occurrence of the attributes is monitored, the initial value for that attribute is updated and normalized. The updated normalized value for the attribute is then compared with the corresponding threshold for that attribute and an imminent failure of the disk drive is predicted if the normalized updated value of the attribute exceeds the threshold therefor.