S.M.A.R.T. - Unknown Health (HDD)

spandexninja

Member
Mar 5, 2013
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My Hitachi Travelstar 1TB 7200RPM 2.5" (0S03563) hard drive sometimes doesn't show 'Threshold' values in CrystalDiskInfo (resulting in 'Unknown' health status). This is fixed by closing and re-opening CrystalDiskInfo. This is the only drive that ever has this problem. Should I be worried?

Error:
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Regular:
29DjziC.png
 
Last edited:

sub.mesa

Senior member
Feb 16, 2010
611
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You are using a modified version; what if you use the standard version?

In either way, this could be a bug in CrystalDiskInfo.

Your SMART looks fine by the way. In most cases you cannot trust what applications like CrystalDiskInfo tell you about the 'health status' of a harddrive. It can tell you GOOD when you have critical problems, or give you a WARNING!! for a harmless single cable error or replaced bad sector, without there ever being any problem with the drive.

You really need to know what those SMART variables mean, and make your own judgements based on that. In particular, three SMART-properties are particularly interesting:

Current Pending Sector = REAL bad sectors that are visible to the host operating system; most dangerous the SMART can tell you
Reallocated Sector Count = harmless indication of swapped reserve sectors. Though if this keeps rising to over multiple hundreds of swapped sectors you need to worry
UDMA CRC Error Count = cable errors

In many cases, the normalised threshold values are not very helpful. For example, your harddrive will not generate an error if your harddrive is over 100 degrees Celsius. Other harddrive vendors will generate a SMART failure if the harddrive reaches 55 degrees Celsius already. Thus, I would not look at threshold values or SMART 'status' but rather at the raw SMART data which tells you much more those applications can summarise in a single 'GOOD' or 'BAD' status.