how do you read "smart" information?

[imported_goku]

I was looking at this website: http://www.beyondlogic.org/solutions/smart/smart.html
and I've run other utilites on my drives to check the smart information and while it says my drive is ok, I want to know what "threshold, Value and worst means". Also on this program is says "type" some listing as prefailure and advisory, what does this exactly mean? How can I interpret these values so I can know if my drive will fail soon. Thanks

 

[Cerb]

Status. Where it says OK. It shouldn't say OK if it sees it is being out of line.
I'm not sure what half of them really mean, even then .

 

[orangat]

Unfortunately many of the values mean one thing with one manufacturer and something other for the rest. Seagate for instance has very high CRC errors which is supposed to be normal. The few which are easily recognizable red flags are reallocated sectors and pending sectors. If those go up every day, its a very bad sign and you should rma and backup soon. A few reallocated sectors every year is probably not such a bad thing (yet).

 

[orangat]

Or you could just run diskwizard (seagate) or powermax (maxtor) and run the quick diagnostic which analyzes SMART data. It doesn't take long at all.

 

[Jeff7]

SMART Readout screenshot

My knowledge/best guess of the data here:

The Data column is what you want to be concerned with.
Raw Read error rate - some drives report it really high. As was mentioned, Seagates are one example. Note though that it's equal to the Hardware ECC Corrected value. Seek Errors are also high here, but apparently normal.

Things to watch for:
Current Pending Sector Count, Offline Uncorrectable Sector Count, Reallocated Sector Count, and Write Error count. If they're normally 0, but they suddenly start showing >0 values, that's not a good thing. They usually indicate that bad sectors are forming.
Different drives will also report different sets of data - for instance, a bunch of Western Digital drives I've worked with do not report the temperature. Laptop drives report a whole slew of values, including a G-force sensor.