[nycbug-talk] disk monitoring tool port, looks usefull

[Charles Sprickman]

On Mon, 24 Oct 2005, Jonathan Franks wrote:

> On Oct 24, 2005, at 4:37 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 24 Oct 2005, Ray Lai wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> Has SMART ever been of use to anyone?  I mean, has anyone actually
>>> received any SMART warnings?  All my hard drives have passed with
>>> flying colors all the time, even questionable ones.
>
> I have a system that's been giving a SMART imminent failure warning for 
> around six years now... I could shut it off in the BIOS but I find it 
> amusing. (It's a non critical machine, obviously)

Well, the line I'm going with is this...  Generally speaking if SMART says 
it's bad, there's a good chance it is.  However, you can't rely on a SMART 
"everything's fine" message.  Sounds pretty grim, but I try to act on the 
warnings - they are enough to get the drive RMA'd if it's under warranty.

It kind of makes sense; isn't the main thing that SMART does is let you 
know that the drive has reallocated more than "X" bad blocks.  Of course 
it can't tell you anything about purely mechanical or electrical failures.

And speaking of drive failures and testing, I did not realize until 
recently that most any vendor's tools will diagnose any other vendor's 
drives.  I've been using the Seagate tool since they are nice enough to 
provide a floppy-sized bootable ISO.  Truly amazing that they pack a 
fairly usable GUI tool in 1.44MB.  Of all the tools I've played with, 
SeaTools seems to have the most verbose reporting...

Don't get me started on trying to test SCSI drives attached to a RAID 
controller...

Charles

> -Jonathan
>