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 during training and 0.86 during testing over the exhaustive 10 year data while being able to generalize competitively over other drives from the Seagate family.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures and 6 table

Data-driven Models for Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Aircraft Engines and Hard Disk Drives

Failure of physical devices can cause inconvenience, loss of money, and sometimes even deaths. To improve the reliability of these devices, we need to know the remaining useful life (RUL) of a device at a given point in time. Data-driven approaches use data from a physical device to build a model that can estimate the RUL. They have shown great performance and are often simpler than traditional model-based approaches. Typical statistical and machine learning approaches are often not suited for sequential data prediction. Recurrent Neural Networks are designed to work with sequential data but suffer from the vanishing gradient problem over time. Therefore, I explore the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for RUL prediction. I perform two experiments. First, I train bidirectional LSTM networks on the Backblaze hard-disk drive dataset. I achieve an accuracy of 96.4\% on a 60 day time window, state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, I use a unique standardization method that standardizes each hard drive instance independently and explore the benefits and downsides of this approach. Finally, I train LSTM models on the NASA N-CMAPSS dataset to predict aircraft engine remaining useful life. I train models on each of the eight sub-datasets, achieving a RMSE of 6.304 on one of the sub-datasets, the second-best in the current literature. I also compare an LSTM network\u27s performance to the performance of a Random Forest and Temporal Convolutional Neural Network model, demonstrating the LSTM network\u27s superior performance. I find that LSTM networks are capable predictors for device remaining useful life and show a thorough model development process that can be reproduced to develop LSTM models for various RUL prediction tasks. These models will be able to improve the reliability of devices such as aircraft engines and hard-disk drives

Predicting Hard Disk Failures in Data Centers Using Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks

In modern data centers, storage system failures are major contributors to downtimes and maintenance costs. Predicting these failures by collecting measurements from disks and analyzing them with machine learning techniques can effectively reduce their impact, enabling timely maintenance. While there is a vast literature on this subject, most approaches attempt to predict hard disk failures using either classic machine learning solutions, such as Random Forests (RFs) or deep Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). In this work, we address hard disk failure prediction using Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs), a novel type of deep neural network for time series analysis. Using a real-world dataset, we show that TCNs outperform both RFs and RNNs. Specifically, we can improve the Fault Detection Rate (FDR) of ≈ 7.5% (FDR = 89.1%) compared to the state-of-the-art, while simultaneously reducing the False Alarm Rate (FAR = 0.052%). Moreover, we explore the network architecture design space showing that TCNs are consistently superior to RNNs for a given model size and complexity and that even relatively small TCNs can reach satisfactory performance. All the codes to reproduce the results presented in this paper are available at https://github.com/ABurrello/tcn-hard-disk-failure-prediction

TFBEST: Dual-Aspect Transformer with Learnable Positional Encoding for Failure Prediction

Hard Disk Drive (HDD) failures in datacenters are costly - from catastrophic data loss to a question of goodwill, stakeholders want to avoid it like the plague. An important tool in proactively monitoring against HDD failure is timely estimation of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL). To this end, the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology employed within HDDs (S.M.A.R.T.) provide critical logs for long-term maintenance of the security and dependability of these essential data storage devices. Data-driven predictive models in the past have used these S.M.A.R.T. logs and CNN/RNN based architectures heavily. However, they have suffered significantly in providing a confidence interval around the predicted RUL values as well as in processing very long sequences of logs. In addition, some of these approaches, such as those based on LSTMs, are inherently slow to train and have tedious feature engineering overheads. To overcome these challenges, in this work we propose a novel transformer architecture - a Temporal-fusion Bi-encoder Self-attention Transformer (TFBEST) for predicting failures in hard-drives. It is an encoder-decoder based deep learning technique that enhances the context gained from understanding health statistics sequences and predicts a sequence of the number of days remaining before a disk potentially fails. In this paper, we also provide a novel confidence margin statistic that can help manufacturers replace a hard-drive within a time frame. Experiments on Seagate HDD data show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art RUL prediction methods during testing over the exhaustive 10-year data from Backblaze (2013-present). Although validated on HDD failure prediction, the TFBEST architecture is well-suited for other prognostics applications and may be adapted for allied regression problems.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Disk failure prediction based on multi-layer domain adaptive learning

Large scale data storage is susceptible to failure. As disks are damaged and replaced, traditional machine learning models, which rely on historical data to make predictions, struggle to accurately predict disk failures. This paper presents a novel method for predicting disk failures by leveraging multi-layer domain adaptive learning techniques. First, disk data with numerous faults is selected as the source domain, and disk data with fewer faults is selected as the target domain. A training of the feature extraction network is performed with the selected origin and destination domains. The contrast between the two domains facilitates the transfer of diagnostic knowledge from the domain of source and target. According to the experimental findings, it has been demonstrated that the proposed technique can generate a reliable prediction model and improve the ability to predict failures on disk data with few failure samples

PORÓWNANIE SKUTECZNOŚCI ALGORYTMÓW UCZENIA MASZYNOWEGO DLA KONSERWACJI PREDYKCYJNEJ

The consequences of failures and unscheduled maintenance are the reasons why engineers have been trying to increase the reliability of industrial equipment for years. In modern solutions, predictive maintenance is a frequently used method. It allows to forecast failures and alert about their possibility. This paper presents a summary of the machine learning algorithms that can be used in predictive maintenance and comparison of their performance. The analysis was made on the basis of data set from Microsoft Azure AI Gallery. The paper presents a comprehensive approach to the issue including feature engineering, preprocessing, dimensionality reduction techniques, as well as tuning of model parameters in order to obtain the highest possible performance. The conducted research allowed to conclude that in the analysed case , the best algorithm achieved 99.92% accuracy out of over 122 thousand test data records. In conclusion, predictive maintenance based on machine learning represents the future of machine reliability in industry.Skutki związane z awariami oraz niezaplanowaną konserwacją to powody, dla których od lat inżynierowie próbują zwiększyć niezawodność osprzętu przemysłowego. W nowoczesnych rozwiązaniach obok tradycyjnych metod stosowana jest również tzw. konserwacja predykcyjna, która pozwala przewidywać awarie i alarmować o możliwości ich powstawania. W niniejszej pracy przedstawiono zestawienie algorytmów uczenia maszynowego, które można zastosować w konserwacji predykcyjnej oraz porównanie ich skuteczności. Analizy dokonano na podstawie zbioru danych Azure AI Gallery udostępnionych przez firmę Microsoft. Praca przedstawia kompleksowe podejście do analizowanego zagadnienia uwzględniające wydobywanie cech charakterystycznych, wstępne przygotowanie danych, zastosowanie technik redukcji wymiarowości, a także dostrajanie parametrów poszczególnych modeli w celu uzyskania najwyższej możliwej skuteczności. Przeprowadzone badania pozwoliły wskazać  najlepszy  algorytm, który uzyskał dokładność na poziomie 99,92%, spośród ponad 122 tys. rekordów danych testowych. Na podstawie tego można stwierdzić, że konserwacja predykcyjna prowadzona w oparciu o uczenie maszynowe stanowi przyszłość w zakresie podniesienia niezawodności maszyn w przemyśle