Anyone’s nightmare is to have their hard drive crash without warning. Losing movies, photos, college jobs and thousands of memes with a lot of sentimental value. Luckily this problem may have its days numbered.
How many times have we gone to turn on the computer and, suddenly, the screen went black asking us to insert a storage unit. This, for many, has been the great nightmare of our adolescence.
Luckily, SSDs arrived almost a decade ago and the vast majority of typical HDD failures and breaks are now dead. This is not to say that solid state drives do not break, but it is true that they have a significantly lower percentage of breaks.
But we still use HDD a lot, and not only we as users, but millions of servers continue to take advantage of HDDs over SSDs. That is, huge amounts of storage for a very affordable price.
And since for these customers the reliability of their hard drives can mean making or losing millions of euros, the companies QNAP and ULINK have come together to develop an artificial intelligence that can predict when an HDD is about to fail.
According to QNAP, companies have trained AI through historical usage data of millions of units so you can learn patterns that predict storage drive failure.
Once the software is installed on the NAS, 14 days of disk usage monitoring are required before AI can reach any conclusions on their health.
From there, will continue to monitor the disks and compare them to its own database of millions of disk behaviors to send you suggestions about its current state and future actions you can take.
Like any neural network, should also get smarter over time, as more hard drives are connected, analyzed and monitored.
Nowadays, the software only works with SATA drives, including SSD and HDD, as SAS and NVME drives are not supported. Or at least for the moment.