Spatio-temporal AI inference engine for estimating hard disk reliability

Abstract

This paper focuses on building a spatio-temporal AI inference engine for estimating hard disk reliability. Most electronic systems such as hard disks routinely collect such reliability parameters in the field to monitor the health of the system. Changes in parameters as a function of time are monitored and any observed changes are compared with the known failure signatures. If the trajectory of the measured data matches that of a failure signature, operators are alerted to take corrective action. However, the interest of the operators lies in being able to identify the failures before they occur. The state of the art methodology including our prior work is to train machine learning models on temporal sequence data capturing the variations across multiple features and using it to predict the remaining useful life of the devices. However, as we show in this paper temporal prediction capability alone is not sufficient and can lead to low precision and the uncertainty around the prediction is very large. This is primarily due to the non-uniform progression of feature patterns over time. Our hypothesis is that the accuracy can be improved if we combine the temporal prediction methods with a spatial analysis that compares the value of key SMART features of the devices across similar model in a fixed time window (unlike the temporal method which uses the data from a single device and a much larger historical window). In this paper, we first describe both temporal and spatial approaches, describe the methods to select various hyperparameters, and then show a workflow to combine these two methodologies and provide comparative results. Our results illustrate that the average precision of temporal methods using long-short temporal memory networks to predict impending failures in the next ten days was 84 percent. To improve precision, we use the set of disks identified as potential failures and start applying spatial anomaly detection methods on those disks. This helps us remove the false positives from the temporal prediction results and provide a tighter bound on the set of disks with impending failure.