Should I be worried by this SMART report ?

taidi · Post by **taidi** » Wed Sep 19, 2007 4:43 am

Using the on-line diagnostic tool from Speedfan I got this alarming report...

http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrepshowrepor ... n=DE1A8CB3

The overall fitness for this drive is 0%.
The overall performance for this drive is 90%.

I ran Seagate's short test and the drive passed, - HDTune's health check also gives the drive an OK result.

Running WinXP Home and have encountered no problems, except that the DiskMon utility shows a constant stream of writes to the drive when there should be minimal activity.

All the usual malware checks have been done.

Any opinions about what could be causing the strange report from HDDStatus ?

Arvo · Post by **Arvo** » Wed Sep 19, 2007 7:48 am

HDDStatus mixes up positive and negative values and short and long integers or smtg.

Sentence "your hard disk has 65535 pending sectors" means actually something alike "we forgot that unsigned 2byte integer is limited to 65535 and we forgot that RAW values are not standardized and we could'nt imagine that RAW values can be signed 4byte integers".

This value 4294967295 is actually 4byte representation of -1 (FFFFFFFF on hexadecimal). IMHO this means that no sectors are about to reallocate

You don't need to worry about your HDD status. Well, "Hardware ECC recovered" attribute value (57) is somewhat lower than expected, but nothing serious.

taidi · Post by **taidi** » Wed Sep 19, 2007 11:40 am

Hey thanks for the reassurance Arvo - the explanation is a bit over my head but it's a comfort to know my drive isn't about to curl up and die

It seems there is no way to contact the owners of the HDDStatus site - if their disagnostics are giving out false negatives about people's hardware they need to be made aware of it.

I'll run Seagate's long test overnight....just to be on the safe side of confident.

Edit: Speedfan's 'system' readout for ECC Recovered is...
Value - 72, Worst - 52, RAW 00009865C28

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Wed Sep 19, 2007 12:04 pm

Just because a drive passes the manufacturersâ€™ diagnostic routine doesnâ€™t mean that it isnâ€™t getting close to failing. Isnâ€™t the point of SMART to catch drives before they fail?

I recently RMAâ€™d a 3 year old Samsung drive as one of the SMART attributes was showing this data:

Spin Up Time:
Current 66
Worst 29
Threshold 0
Data 5824

The other data was fine and it passed the Samsung diagnostic test but they replaced it anyway with a turn around of 3 working days.

taidi · Post by **taidi** » Thu Sep 20, 2007 12:53 am

smilingcrow wrote:Just because a drive passes the manufacturersâ€™ diagnostic routine doesnâ€™t mean that it isnâ€™t getting close to failing. Isnâ€™t the point of SMART to catch drives before they fail?.

You would think so - but the implication on Seagate's website is that if the drive passes their diagnostic test a warranty exchange isn't available. This drive passed the long test I ran last night.

There seems to be no facility to report SMART readings that suggest the drive might be close to failure.

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Thu Sep 20, 2007 9:01 am

taidi wrote:You would think so - but the implication on Seagate's website is that if the drive passes their diagnostic test a warranty exchange isn't available. This drive passed the long test I ran last night.

There seems to be no facility to report SMART readings that suggest the drive might be close to failure.

I was very surprised that Samung replaced the drive. I phoned them to confirm their email as its contents werenâ€™t explicit enough for me to be 100% sure. I had told them that the drive passed their diagnostic check.
Who knows if this is typical of Samsung UK or Samsung Worldwide and how the other drive manufacturers handle this situation.

The irony is that I only noticed the SMART data because the motherboard was failing and I initially thought the drive (or O/S install) was the problem. I have to confess to almost never checking SMART data but I will in future and might even run a background utility set to check the once a day or so.