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

[Jonathan Franks]

On Oct 24, 2005, at 10:09 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> 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.

Well, I agree, but the machine in question fell victim to what I  
presume is a Windows "bug" of sorts that may simply be a piece of  
history at this point.... but what I experienced repeatedly at the  
time (around 5 or 6 years back) was that if you had a Win NT box  
formatted with NTFS, and then for whatever reason decided to format  
with FAT32 and load Win9x, the drive would report SMART failure  
around 60 percent of the time. If you then fdisked the drive and  
tried again, it would disappear and everything would work fine (for a  
Windows box anyhow).

It's not really valuable input, and for that I apologize, but I  
couldn't help myself when I saw the thread. Anyhow, ever since then i  
have viewed SMART warnings with some skepticism....


>
> 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
>>
>>
>
>