High Danger of Defect: Machine learning model predicts potential disk failures in Google's DCs – Blocks and Files

Google has devised a machine learning (ML) model that predicts disk failures with 98 per cent accuracy. The idea is to reduce data recovery work when disks actually fail. According to a Google blog by technical program manager Nitin Agarwal and AI engineer Rostam Dinyari, Google has millions of hard disk drives (HDDs) under management, some of which fail. "Any misses in identifying these failures at the right time can potentially cause serious outages across our many products and services." When a disk in Google's data centres encounters non-fatal problems, short of an actual crash, then data is (drained) read from the drive. The drive is then disconnected from production use, they apply diagnostics and it is fixed and returned to production.