DriveNest

Storage devices, such as hard disk and solid state drives, are getting smaller and faster, but are still prone to faults, often resulting in data loss and costly downtime of important technical infrastructure. Despite recent technological advances in hardware design and manufacturing, it is still unclear what the exact causes of those failures are and how to detect an imminent failure; enabling proactive mitigation, such as data replication and backup. Moreover, the storage retail market is flooded with devices of dubious quality, and often times performance and robustness specifications are exaggerated by their manufacturers, hindering the ability of the end-users to make an informed choice of storage devices.
DriveNest (www.drivenest.com) is a crowd-monitoring platform of storage devices which are distributed anywhere around the globe. The objective is to collect reliability indicators from devices deployed ‘in-the-wild’ (not in controlled data center environments), and provide users with statistics and failure forecasting based on predictive analytics. Statistics across a global population of storage devices will enable end-users to purchase storage devices based on hard data, while failure prediction will assist end-users, system administrators, and backup software designers to proactively act upon imminent hardware failures.

The project is under constant development and thus constructive feedback is important to us.