SMART data issues?

[VirtualLarry]

Installed a 30GB OCZ Agility SSD for a friend, along with Win7 HP 64-bit. When I installed Windows, the SSD was at 1.6 firmware. I updated it to the 1.7 firmware after the install.

I was perusing the Health (SMART) status in HDTune Free edition, and this is what I see:

Is the UltraDMA CRC Error Count kind of high? Does this suggest that I need to replace the SATA cable? The mobo and drive only have SATA2 ports on them.

Also, the "Offline Uncorrectable" seems pretty high too, 6000 bad sectors mapped out already? A HDTune surface scan returns all green blocks.


http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Ultra-DMA-CRC-Error-Count-Warning/td-p/8913

After a bit of digging around and using a program called CrystalDiskInfo v2.2, which is made for SSDs, I discovered that on SSDs C7 represents something totally different than it does on HDDs, something to do with successful writes or something like that. I realised that was why the count was increasing! You'd expect it to, right?

Unless the software you're using is written to interpret SMART for SSDs then I'd suggest you just ignore it. Use CrystalDiskInfo if you must put your mind at ease but I suspect if you do it'll return a '100% Good' as it did for mine.

 

[Elixer]

Verify with crystaldiskinfo 4+.

 

[NP Complete]

SMART is just a specification for data reporting, and doesn't prescribe exactly how all the data reported should be generated (e.g. it says something like "for command SMART command h, return data with read count in position X, sector count in position Y). Additionally, a lot of the SMART specification specifies data that doesn't make much sense for SSDs (stuff like spin-up/spin-down, and even to some sense "bad sectors" since the base SSD unit of storage is in NAND pages/blocks).

I'd take SMART statistics for SSDs with a grain of salt. Unless you have access to the SSD's data sheet which includes all the SMART statistics, some of the fields may mean something different for that particular model than what HDTune is describing.

 

[Mark R]

The problem with SMART is that there are no standards for which SMART code means what.

So, while the program you are using calls SMART code C6 "offline uncorrectable errors", that doesn't necessarily mean that the drive is using code C6 to mean the same thing.

In fact, the OCZ agility uses code C6 to mean "total number of MBytes read", and uses code C7 to mean "total number of Mbytes written".