Comment 23 for bug 412152

The other answer is

sudo aptitude remove gnome-disk-tools

Jean Roberto Souza wrote:
> Now this was a good answer. Thank you DjDarkman!
>
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 6:57 AM, mac_v <email address hidden> wrote:
>
>> DjDarkman ,
>> The notification can be disabled from System> Preferences> Startup
>> Applications> Disk Notifications.
...
>>
>> But that is not a solution , since this would probably prevent the
>> notification when the disk is really failing.

This is really a statistical problem. Computer programmers shouldn't
argue. The thing is, it's very much like earthquake prediction.

If you predict an earthquake in San Francisco often enough, eventually
you'll be right. The San Andreas fault is there, and eventually it's
going to let go. The same with everyone's disk drives. However,
it's really not a good idea to warn San Francisco every month when
it might be 50 years until the next big earthquake.

People who predict earthquakes have understood the problem and don't
issue predictions because they know they cannot predict well enough
to be useful. People who predict disk drives should do the same.
If you read the actual research papers on the subject, they come
to that conclusion.

The trouble is that if you are predicting an event that doesn't happen
very often, you can be in a difficult situation where
(a) You know the event is much more likely than normal, and
(b) the event is still very improbable.

So, for instance with disk drives, the average probability of failure
is about 1 in a thousand per month: 0.1% per month. If you
look at the SMART information, you can sometimes tell that this
disk drive is, perhaps, 5 times more likely to fail than normal.
But that's _still_ _small_. It's still 0.5% per month.

So, even after certain indicators of failure happen, there
might still be less than a 1% chance that the disk drive will
fail soon. In that case, the best thing to do is to
remain silent.

Why? Because if someone listens to the warning, and acts on it,
the cost will be relatively large. Whereas the probability
of failure is still relatively small.

If you really have your heart tied to this software, if you really
love it like your first child, and you really don't want it disabled,
then the thing to do is to minimize the damage it causes.
In that case do the following:

Change the warning message from "Your disk is failing"
to "Back up your data: SMART predicts a larger-than-normal
chance of disk failure."