abwaters 2.0 » Google

Google says S.M.A.R.T. is Dumb!

digg — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 17:09:35 +0000

Google’s study looked at more than one hundred thousand disk drives which were a combination of serial and parallel ATA consumer-grade hard disk drives, ranging in speed from 5400 to 7200 rpm, and in size from 80 to 400 GB. The observed range of annualized failure rates varied from 1.7 percent, for drives that were in their first year of operation, to over 8.6 percent, observed in their third year.

I have spent many sleepless waiting for a hard drive to fail simply because S.M.A.R.T. predicting impending failure. For several years I would have the following email message sent by cPanel.

Subject: [cPanel smartcheck] Possible Hard Drive Failure Soon
S.M.A.R.T Errors on /dev/hda
From Command: /usr/sbin/smartctl -q errorsonly -H -l selftest -l error /dev/hda
ATA Error Count: 1
Error 1 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 93 hours
—-END /dev/hda–

I eventually switched to another machine simply because I couldn’t take the stress but the hard drive never did fail.

Take a look at Google’s findings…if only I had known!

Google Gadget Ventures – earn $100,000 from Google to develop gadgets

digg — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 03:14:25 +0000

Marissa Mayar, VP of Google, announced a Google Gadget Ventures where they pay developers $100,000 to build gadgets.

Google opens up malware blacklist API

digg — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 13:54:28 +0000

Google employees Brian Rakowski and Garrett Casto from the Antiphishing and Antimalware Teams have announced that the company is opening up its Safe Browsing API to the public. The Safe Browsing API allows easy access to Google’s updated blacklist of suspected phishing and malware-infested web pages.