Qnap launches DA Drive Analyzer 2.0. This tool has AI on board and can therefore predict hard drive failure before it happens. This minimizes downtime in the event of a drive failure.

Qnap introduces its DA Drive Analyzer 2.0. This is software for the manufacturer’s NAS devices. The Drive Analyzer monitors the health of the hard drives in the NAS and combines telemetry with AI to predict possible hard drive failure up to six months before it actually occurs. This theoretically gives you time to replace a problematic drive with minimal downtime and prevent data loss.

Smarter than SMART

Qnap states that SMART alone has its limitations and thirty percent of drive problems do not trigger a SMART message. For this reason, Drive Analyzer collects more telemetry data and sends this data to the cloud once a day. There, Qnap unleashes AI on the data. This AI was trained on data from more than a million drives. Qnap is confident that the approach makes it possible to detect within 24 hours that a hard drive will fail within six months.

Qnap aims its functionality at SMEs and companies. Since hard drive data goes to the cloud, the manufacturer builds in additional security so that your IP address remains hidden when uploading the data. You can customize when to upload the data. DA Drive Analyzer 2.0 works not only with classic SATA hard drives, but also with SSDs and SAS or NVMe.

Prices

As a Qnap user, you can download the tool yourself for free via the App Center. However, it is not completely free to use. Each Qnap NAS comes with a license to monitor one drive with AI. If you want to monitor multiple drives, it costs five dollars per drive per year for one to two additional drives or $4.75 per drive per year for three to four drives. For five to seven installments, the price drops to $4.5 per year, and for eight or more installments it bottoms out at $4.25 per year.