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Forums » Tech and Talk » OS and Software » All Things Unix » S.M.A.R.T. shows obviously wrong attribute!
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The Rig »
« CIFS mount - files not appearing in trash  
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T0rn
Premium
join:2001-05-11
USA

 reply to koitsu
Re: S.M.A.R.T. shows obviously wrong attribute!

said by koitsu See Profile :

There are 3 issues here:

1) Your drive isn't in the internal smartctl database (used for handling SMART attribute tweaks):


Please get in contact with Bruce Allen and provide him the output you've provided above, and/or any other details he asks for.

2) It doesn't matter what values are shown in the RAW_VALUE column. You cannot look at SMART stats and assume what's returned is literally what's true. Seagate drives, for example, have exceedingly high numbers for SMART attribute 1 and 195, yet the drives are far from going bad.

What you absolutely need to look at under all circumstances is the VALUE compared to THRESH. These are the adjusted threshold values for what will trip a failed SMART health check -- that is to say, the adjusted values are what represent whether or not your drive is in good/bad condition. If you look at attribute 5, you can see that your current VALUE is 100, and the THRESH is set to 24. The WORST column represents the worst value ever seen on the drive, which is 100.

Thus, you can conclude your drive has very few (more than likely, zero!) reallocated sectors.

What you need to understand is that the specification for SMART does not require vendors to store their raw data in a defined format -- they can store whatever values they want there. Seagate is known for encoding some of their raw SMART data in a way which is only known to them. Bruce has figured out a couple of the encoding methods for some of the attributes, but not all of them.

Additionally, your drive has no indication of it ever seeing read or write failures at specific LBAs, indicating sector r/w failures. These would show up in the SMART log, and your SMART log is empty.

I can point you to an older thread here at DSLR where I posted "how" to read SMART attributes, if you'd like to read it.

3) Fujitsu has a very long history of "abusing" SMART. You can read the smartmontools FAQ page and documentation for further evidence of this.

And for sake of argument: we use Fujitsu SCSI drives (both 37GB and 120GB) at my workplace -- and have, on average, one of them go bad every week. Most of them suffer from two problems: 1) sectors going bad (confirmed using the SCSI card's BIOS), or 2) the drive literally falling off the SCSI bus (no indication of termination problems, controller issues, or otherwise), requiring a complete power-cycle of the drive before it will reappear (a soft reset won't fix it) on the bus. The latter indicates either crummy PCB design, shoddy components, or a major firmware bug.

And remember, people like to state that "SCSI drives are more robust/higher quality than ATA/SATA drives" -- which isn't necessarily true these days, but still: I wouldn't recommend Fujitsu even if they were the last hard drive manufacturer on the planet. That's just my opinion as someone who works with these drives in an enterprise environment 40 hours a week. :-)

Thanks for the in-depth reply, koitsu. It has really given me a lot of insight. I will buzz Bruce Allen with an email about this, and provide whatever information he needs. Not sure if it will help much, but it is worth a try. I suppose I was looking too deep into this SMART reading, that I overlooked some basic hints about my drive's health. I may, in fact, just replace this drive with an SSD in the future, once the prices drop some more. It seems that in theory, an SSD drive gives you less headaches, and aside from the maximum times a memory cell can be rewritten, there are very few things that can cause an SSD to go bad. Plus, the additional battery life is a welcoming perk.

--
CampaignForLiberty.com Educate yourself.


koitsu
Premium
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA

No problem. Knowing how to read SMART stats -- specifically, when to and when not to trust RAW_VALUE -- is incredibly important. Sadly there's no "global standard" for interpreting the results, which is why smartctl has a drive database.

Also, if you plan on using an SSD, you will run into headaches. I document what my experience was like with XP, but the same applies to *IX operating systems. To me, the pain of setting it up (at least on Windows XP -- it's less of a pain on *IX given the low-level nature of partitioning/fs utilities) wasn't worth it. If I ran an *IX OS on my desktop, I'd probably have reinstalled the OS + repartitioned at the proper block boundary and been thrilled. But without a 2nd PC around, this isn't easy to do on XP.
--
Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer.

KodiacZiller

join:2008-09-04
73368
Another reason to use Western Digital, not that the OP had any choice in the matter here.
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