fail soft

fail soft

[′fāl ‚sȯft] (engineering) A failure in the performance of a system component that neither results in immediate or major interruption of the system operation as a whole nor adversely affects the quality of its products.

fail soft

The ability to fail with minimum destruction. For example, a disk drive can be built to automatically park the heads when power fails. Although it does not correct the problem, it minimizes destruction. See failover and fault tolerant.