No cure in sight for unpredictable hard drive loss

Earlier this month, Google researchers released a fascinating paper called 'Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population' that examined hard drive failure rates in Google's infrastructure. Two conclusions stood out: self-monitoring data isn't useful for predicting individual drive failures, and temperature and activity levels don't correlate well with drive failure. This throws conventional wisdom about predicting drive failures into question, so we sought out some independent expert analysis to weigh in on the findings.