A combined Bayesian network method for predicting drive failure times from SMART attributes

Statistical and machine learning methods have been proposed to predict hard drive failure based on SMART attributes, and many achieve good performance. However, these models do not give a good indication as to when a drive will fail, only predicting that it will fail. To this end, we propose a new notion of a drive's health degree based on the remaining working time of hard drive before actual failure occurs. An ensemble learning method is implemented to predict these health degrees: four popular individual classifiers are individually trained and used in a Combined Bayesian Network (CBN). Experiments show that the CBN model can give a health assessment under the proposed definition where drives are predicted to fail no later than their actual failure time 70% or more of the time, while maintaining prediction performance standards at least approximately as good as the individual classifiers.