The disclosed embodiments provide a system that proactively resilvers a disk array when a disk drive in the array is determined to have an elevated risk of failure. The system receives time-series signals associated with the disk array during operation of the disk array. Next, the system analyzes the time-series signals to identify at-risk disk drives that have an elevated risk of failure. If one or more disk drives are identified as being at-risk, the system performs a proactive resilvering operation on the disk array using a background process while the disk array continues to operate using the at-risk disk drives.