Generally, fatal hard disk drive failures can be classified in (a) failures due to general aging and hardware abrasions and (b) sudden failures because of extreme external incidence (as a fall of or very high environment temperature). Apart from the latter, between 60% and 70% of all sudden hard disk drive failures can be forecasted by S.M.A.R.T. technology nowadays if the S.M.A.R.T. status is appraised in regular intervals not larger than 3 hours.
