SMART Disk Dying

[Myles Green]

On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 21:27:51 -0500
Kurt Wall <kwall at kurtwerks.com> wrote:

> It appears that /dev/hdb is going south. The BIOS SMART monitor kicked
> on this afternoon telling me that the disk was going to go bad within
> 24 hours and to get all my data off of it NOW. So, I've done so. More
> interesting, after booting into single user mode and while copying data
> off the disk, I got some DMA timeouts and other errors, so evidently SMART
> is pretty smart. Meanwhile, smartctl had some interesting things to say:
> 
> # smartctl -H /dev/hdb 
> 
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
> SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
> Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
> Failed Attributes:
> ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
> 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0009   018   155   051    Pre-fail  Offline  FAILING_NOW 4372
> 
> # smartctl -l selftest >> /dev/hdb
> 
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
> SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
> Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
> # 1  Short offline       Completed: unknown failure    90%       802         0xfffc0000
> 
> My question is, can I believe this information?

I just recently saw the same error messages here. In my case, the drives continued to function for a few more weeks but failed this week, just two days apart. FYI, these were Maxtor fluid bearing units just old enough to be outside of the warranty period :-(

HTH,
Myles

PS Happy New Year to one and all

-- 
Myles Green <rmg57 at telus dot net> Calgary AB Canada
Ubuntu Linux 5.04 "Hoary Hedgehog" Dev. Branch  http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
GnuPG public key (9D02F338)  http://keyserver-beta.pgp.com/