Predictive failure analysis

Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) refers to computer mechanisms that analyse trends in corrected errors to predict future failures of hardware components and proactively enabling mechanisms to avoid them. Predictive Failure Analysis was originally used as term for a proprietary IBM technology for monitoring the likelihood of hard disk drives to fail, although the term is now used generically for a variety of technologies for judging the imminent failure of CPU's, memory and I/O devices. See also first failure data capture.