Earlier failure detection of disks?

fastfwd, you make a good argument. I shall call them when I'm back in town and in front of the device.

In the meantime, I have (what I hope is) a much more robust solution than the default.

Inspired by this post:
http://community.spiceworks.com/scripts ... t-rollover

I've whipped up the following script that runs a a cron job every hour:

#!/bin/bash

# This is a script that will grep a log file and send an email when a specified patter is encountered.
# Original Author: Salman Bayat
# http://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/225-email-notifications-gernerated-via-monitoring-of-logs-that-rollover
#

errors=$(grep -wE ' Disk failure on sd[a-g][0-6], disabling device.|SMART' /var/log/syslog)
#errors=$(grep "System Error Pattern Here" /var/log/yourlogfilehere.log)
echo "${errors}" > /tmp/current-errors.log

if [ -e "/tmp/prior-errors.log" ]; then
   echo "prior-errors.log Exists" > /dev/null
else
   touch /tmp/prior-errors.log | echo "" > /tmp/prior-errors.log
fi

newentries=$(diff --suppress-common-lines -u /tmp/prior-errors.log /tmp/current-errors.log | grep '\+[0-9]')

if
   test "$newentries" != ""  &&  test "$errors" = ""
   then
   echo "No New Errors" > /dev/null
elif
   test "$newentries" != ""
   then
   echo -e "To: ADMIN\nFrom: READYNAS\nSubject: new SYSLOG events detected!\n\nThe following syslog errors have been detected matching your alert pattern:\n\n${errors}" | /usr/sbin/sendmail <my_email_address>
   echo "$errors" > /tmp/prior-errors.log
fi

The beauty of this script is I can customize it to email me whenever anything interesting occurs in the syslog.