[riddley]

I often see these discussions and "drive failure" is often mentioned and I wish the phrase was instead "unrecoverable read error" because that's the more accurate phrase. To me, "drive failure" conjures ideas of completely failed devices. An unrecoverable read error can and does happen on our bigger and bigger drives with regularity and will stop most raid rebuilds in their tracks.

[wongarsu]

"unrecoverable read error" or "defects" is probably a better framing because it highlights the need to run regular scrubs of your RAID. If you don't search for errors but just wait until the disk no longer powers on you might find out that by then you have more errors than your RAID configuration can recover from