Catastrophic disk failure, where was smartd?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 08:35:49 -0500,
  "David G. Mackay" <mackay_d at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> 
> Shouldn't there have been some indication of problems prior to the
> failure?

Only if you are lucky. Someone at Google published some information about
smart around a year ago. In cases where catastrophic failures occur, for a high
percentage there is no warning from smart.