Large-scale End-of-Life Prediction of Hard Disks in Distributed Datacenters

On a daily basis, data centers process huge volumes of data backed by the proliferation of inexpensive hard disks. Data stored in these disks serve a range of critical functional needs from financial, and healthcare to aerospace. As such, premature disk failure and consequent loss of data can be catastrophic. To mitigate the risk of failures, cloud storage providers perform condition-based monitoring and replace hard disks before they fail. By estimating the remaining useful life of hard disk drives, one can predict the time-to-failure of a particular device and replace it at the right time, ensuring maximum utilization whilst reducing operational costs. In this work, large-scale predictive analyses are performed using severely skewed health statistics data by incorporating customized feature engineering and a suite of sequence learners. Past work suggests using LSTMs as an excellent approach to predicting remaining useful life. To this end, we present an encoder-decoder LSTM model where the context gained from understanding health statistics sequences aid in predicting an output sequence of the number of days remaining before a disk potentially fails. The models developed in this work are trained and tested across an exhaustive set of all of the 10 years of S.M.A.R.T. health data in circulation from Backblaze and on a wide variety of disk instances. It closes the knowledge gap on what full-scale training achieves on thousands of devices and advances the state-of-the-art by providing tangible metrics for evaluation and generalization for practitioners looking to extend their workflow to all years of health data in circulation across disk manufacturers. The encoder-decoder LSTM posted an RMSE of 0.83 on an exhaustive set while being able to generalize competitively over the other Seagate family hard drives.