Assessment of Current Health of Hard Disk Drives

Prognostics and health management of computer hard disk drives is beneficial from two different angles: it can help computer users plan for timely replacement of HDDs before they catastrophically fail and cause serious data loss; it can also help product recover facilities reuse hard disks recovered from the end-of-life computers for building refurbished computers. This paper presents a HDD health assessment method using Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) attributes. It also presents the state-of-the art results in monitoring the condition of hard disks and offers future directions for distributed hard disk monitoring.