Hard drive issues – SpinRite vs. S.M.A.R.T

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The Toshiba hard drive in a Sony VAIO laptop went bad. I put in a Western Digital drive (WD1600BEVS-60RST0, firmware v4.01G04) from an HP laptop. I ran SpinRite at level 2 and found some bad sectors, but it seemed to recover data and mark. I ran SpinRite at level 5, and it took approximately 30 hours, but it finished clean – no report of any problems.

However, when I boot, I get a non-specific S.M.A.R.T. error saying something to the effect of "drive failure is imminent!" So I'm a little confused – SpinRite said, "all good!", but S.M.A.R.T. is saying "Danger, Will Robinson!". Who do I trust? What's going on? What does S.M.A.R.T. know that SpinRite doesn't?

Best Answer

If SpinRite is not reading the SMART parameters itself, then potentially lots.

The SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) values are a set of variables tracked by the drive itself concerning many things from general age related counts (time powered up, number of power ups in lifetime, ...), basic health monitoring (number of recoverable errors recovered from, length of spin-up time, number of sectors remapped due to repeated recoverable error, number of reserved blocks remaining for such remapping, current temperature, historic maximum temperature, ...) as well as explicit failure indicators (number of unrecoverable errors encountered, number of failures in past self-tests, ...). Most of these counters/flags have an associated benchmark above/below which the drive starts to consider itself on the way out.

While SpinRite has moved the data off those dodgy sectors and marked them in the filesystem so they do not get used again, the drive does not know about this. All it knows is that is has more unrecoverable errors in its saved state than it is happy with, and presumably other less serious indicators that its condition is bad and/or declining, and when the BIOS reads this it warns you.

The drive knows its own condition better than SpinRite does. I suggest you follow its warning and replaces it ASAP, in case the issue that caused the bad sectors worsens. It might not get any worse (there may have been a very small imperfection in the surface of one of the platters and everything else is fine), but if you have any data on there that you care about can you afford to take the risk?

One caveat: your BIOS may not be reading the SMART indicators correctly, but as you have actually seen bad sectors reported at the OS/application level I doubt this to be the case, so it might be worth grabbing some software to look at them yourself. There are many utilities available to scan and display SMART parameters from your drives - you might even find one specific to your manufacturer (which may include better descriptions of metrics that aren't common/standard - SMART allows for manufacturer/model specific metric to be stored and read) provided on their site.

Related Solutions

Hard Drive – Why Different Manufacturers Have Different S.M.A.R.T Values

It does appear that different manufacturers use SMART values for sometimes radically different things, as you can see here:

My hard disk(s) in ReadyNAS is reporting high SMART Raw Read Error Rate, Seek Error Rate, and Hardware ECC Recovered. What should I do?

Seagate uses these SMART fields for internal counts, so this is a known issue with Seagate disks. Look for abnormal counts in other fields, especially Reallocated Sector Ct and ATA Error Count.

So when it comes to your actual question ...

If I am lucky enough for a bad drive to show a hint of failure such as scan errors or reallocated sectors, I know to get the drive the heck out of there. If no such hint exists, I'll probably spend many hours troubleshooting slowness and data corruption until I finally find that the hard drive is bad.

I'd say a good rule of thumb is, you can only expect SMART settings to be comparable within the same drive manufacturer, and maybe even the same drive model!

So when you're looking at diagnosing those SMART counts, keep that in mind... one manufacturer's "read error retry count" may mean something totally different than another manufacturer's. Sad but true. :(

How to make smartd shut up about one particular offline uncorrectable sector

On a some disks, you might have to resort to -U 198+ (or -U + ?) in the config file.

Please be careful. If you are not the original asker, read through the whole question carefully. If you use this on a disk which does not need it, it will suppress entirely valid warnings.

If ´+´ is specified, a report is only printed if the number of sec‐ tors has increased since the last check cycle. Some disks do not reset this attribute when a bad sector is reallocated. See also ´-v 198,increasing´ below.

smartd.conf (5)

For example, suppose you are using the default configuration in smartd.conf. In that case, there are many comments in the file, but the only non-comment line is here:

# The word DEVICESCAN will cause any remaining lines in this
# configuration file to be ignored: it tells smartd to scan for all
# ATA and SCSI devices.  DEVICESCAN may be followed by any of the
# Directives listed below, which will be applied to all devices that
# are found.  Most users should comment out DEVICESCAN and explicitly
# list the devices that they wish to monitor.
DEVICESCAN

Add the option to the end of the line:

DEVICESCAN -U 198+

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Hard Drive – Why Different Manufacturers Have Different S.M.A.R.T Values

How to make smartd shut up about one particular offline uncorrectable sector

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