Hard drive software that IT administrators use to monitor drive health is highly inconsistent from drive to drive and manufacturer to manufacturer, according to data collected from nearly 40,000 spindles.

The data, released today from cloud service provider Backblaze, also indicated which five of the 70 metrics that SMART stats cover are likely to predict a hard drive failure.

SMART, or Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, is nearly ubiquitous firmware that vendors embed as tools to alert IT admins to impending problems.

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