S.M.A.R.T. sometimes dumb?

XeonTux

Golden Member
Dec 4, 2000
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How often are S.M.A.R.T. error messages ever given by mistake, when there is nothing wrong with a hard disk?

I had a WD which, according to the owner, had given a "failure is imminent" warning on boot once. It scared em, so I had to look at it. I ran both WD's quick and extensive tests without any sign of trouble. Plus I rebooted the thing a dozen times without getting any sign of a SMART error.

I saw another system once that gave a one time warning, but just like my last example I could not find a problem and the drive is still running strong. I think I may have swapped the cable on this one for the hell of it.

I would hate to be one of those idiots who RMA good components...but on the other hand it is not easy to explain that the drive is good to someone who has just seen a message telling them that failure is imminent, back up your data and replace your hard drive.

Funny how when I do have to replace a dead HD though, there was never any report of a SMART warning beforehand...hmmm
 

Slacker

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
8,623
33
91
I never enabled s.m.a.r.t. for my drives, last week I thought "What the heck" and enabled it, when I booted my western digital drive gave a loud CLICK and I got a general failure reading drive c: :| scared the sht out of me! oh no! my drive is dead! I thought.

I turned off the computer and checked all the connections (praying all the while) and turned it back on and went immediately into the bios and turned that sht off! rebooted without a hitch! f'n S.M.A.R.T. my ass, never again!
 

Modus

Platinum Member
Oct 9, 1999
2,235
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It's usually smart to enable SMART. Hard drives have featured self-monitoring technology for years now. It works by error and retry tolerance. If the drive reports too many read/write retries, or consistently takes too long to do a certain measurable head movement, it will report that to the system BIOS.

I'd sure as hell rather have an over-cautious SMART buy me a couple days to backup my data then have no warning at all until the dread click-Click-CLUNK.

Modus
 

Sir Fredrick

Guest
Oct 14, 1999
4,375
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I agree with Modus (as amazing as that may sound), SMART is a good thing. If you got that error once, it's likely to happen again (not necessarily immediately, but relatively soon). Then they will become more frequent, and slowly it will die. That's what happened to one of the lab computers anyway. if the drive is getting SMART errors, even just one, I sure wouldn't count on it for holding anything other than completely disposable data.
 

MadRat

Lifer
Oct 14, 1999
11,960
278
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SMART got a bad rep because the early adopters of it really had some big bugs rear their heads. New harddrives reported problems within days of installation, sometimes even right after installation. A general power failure would trigger errors, too. I haven't tried it since.