By akademiotoelektronik, 15/05/2022

This artificial intelligence to predict when your hard drive will fail you

QNAP offers an AI-based tool to predict hard drive failures. DA Drive Analyzer will analyze data from millions of hard drives.

In the IT driven world that we have been in for many years now, storage is a critical component. Whether it's on a server on the other side of the planet or in the computer you use every day, storage is very important. And when it shows signs of weakness, there is a lot to worry about for your important data and files. There is an artificial intelligence today that could make your life safer.

QNAP offers an AI-based tool to predict hard drive failures

You have most certainly already had the painful experience of a hard drive at the end of its life. And coincidentally, it starts to give up the ghost, even totally gives up the ghost at the worst possible moment, when you need to do an important job or you have spent long hours on a video or audio file. And then you find that everything disappeared with the crash, purely and simply. This of course, in case you do not make frequent backups.

That being said, it's kind of like we're all playing the lottery with the hard drive crashing. There's no way of knowing when it's going to happen. Sometimes you are entitled to certain warnings, your machine shows you various error messages, but sometimes it comes out of nowhere. Today, NAS manufacturer QNAP thinks it has found a solution thanks to an algorithm based on artificial intelligence.

DA Drive Analyzer will analyze data from millions of hard drives

The company has developed a tool called DA Drive Analyzer. How it works is the often: it uses artificial intelligence to predict when a NAS drive might fail you. Artificial intelligence looks for various signs in the data obtained from millions of hard drives. In other words, it will learn what caused the hard drives to fail and look for warning signs on your own hard drives.

And if this all sounds familiar to you, it's probably because Google is also very interested in this kind of technology. The Mountain View firm announced a partnership with Seagate a few months ago. The American giant will set up a machine learning model which should eventually make it possible to predict hard drive failures.

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