I'll try to get the datacenter techs to answer tomorrow, but here is my best off the cuff attempt: > predict if a drive will fail We have some heuristics (hig

I'll try to get the datacenter techs to answer tomorrow, but here is my best off the cuff attempt: > predict if a drive will fail We have some heuristics (high numbers of time outs and high remapped sectors), but in the end most failures are sudden and catastrophic. It is more like statistical tendencies, the most obvious one being drive age. > sparsely in rows Others have noticed, I have to ask the OTHER Brian (Brian Beach did the lion's share of this drive stat collection and presentation). > its you guys Aww shucks. :-) But remember, we do this as a guide for ourselves, but we spend most days working on backup features and scaling, we don't have a lot of extra time. That's why we sending this data out there, some smart grad student or PhD in Xerox PARC can hopefully figure out some good stuff we missed! Besides, I don't think math and statistics are our strength, we just happen to be sitting on one of the world's larger stock piles of spinning drives with access to the computers with scripts. :-)