Hard drive testing

[16k_zx81]

Everyone should know Smart status is useless... you need to be able to understand the attributes and what they mean. Which is often different for each manufacturer. If you really want to know if a HDD is good or not you need to know the condition of the entire platter (some one above said that too in different words) that means testing the whole thing.. than you have to have a basic understanding of the smart attributes so you can translate the values into meanful info and make an educated decision if the drive is good or not.

This is one of a hundred pictures I have of HDD's that smart status calls good that clearly are not, do yourself a favor (and your clients) don't use the smart status.

View attachment 3500

Thats quite a strong position you have there. So you reckon SMART is completely useless, has no value whatever in indicating the health of a given hard drive?

 

[SilverLeaf]

SMART status and SMART attributes are different animals. SMART status is basically a pass/fail designation, and is not overly reliable. SMART attributes, on the other hand, can give you a fairly good idea of the drives condition. The onboard self-tests will help verify this.

 

[Markverhyden]

Just like everything else in life there is no silver bullet when it comes to HD diags. Personally I use SMART reports as just another tool. There can be false positives as well as false negatives.

I've had drives pass SMART tests but I know they are failing since they only survive 10 or so reboots before they permanently BSD. Also have seen people bring in machines that booted to a SMART error. Of course the first thing I discussed after seeing that is data backup, etc. They tell me that is not what they are bringing it in for. Been doing that for weeks/months/ even years.

But, generally speaking, I'm pretty insistent that if the SMART error does not go away during testing they have to replace the drive if they want me to work on it.

 

[PCX]

As mentioned by many others, gsmartcontrol is one of the best tools available, both because of its accuracy and because of its ability to test multiple hard drives at once. Also, you should ALWAYS run an extended test. At least half of the hard drives that fail in our shop fail during the extended test with little to no indication of possible failure from the SMART attributes/status or short test.

 

[ComputerPro]

On avg, how long does the gsmartcontrol ext test take? Say for a 500gb- 1tb drive.

 

[SilverLeaf]

Don't get me wrong, I use gsmartcontrol most of the time......mainly because my bench machine and my PXE diagnostic tools are Linux. But, gsmartcontrol is merely a GUI front end for smartctl, which is the Linux command line app for accessing SMART data and functions, like the on-board self tests. The SMART data and self tests are the same regardless of which program you use to view the data or initiate the tests. The real advantage to gsmartcontrol is that it is FOSS, can test multiple drive simultaneously (as PCX mentioned), and provides decent support for many popular RAID controllers. Otherwise, all it really does is to provide access to the same SMART related data and tests that several other programs do as well....like the manufacturer's utilities for example.

 

[PCX]

On avg, how long does the gsmartcontrol ext test take? Say for a 500gb- 1tb drive.

Honestly, I have not timed each drive, nor have I paid much attention, but I can tell you that it will take between 1-4 hours depending on the size. If you build machine that can handle several drives at once, you can get through them pretty quick. Plus half of them will probably fail long before the tests are completed.

 

[FremontPC]

Everyone should know Smart status is useless... you need to be able to understand the attributes and what they mean. Which is often different for each manufacturer. If you really want to know if a HDD is good or not you need to know the condition of the entire platter (some one above said that too in different words) that means testing the whole thing.. than you have to have a basic understanding of the smart attributes so you can translate the values into meanful info and make an educated decision if the drive is good or not.

This is one of a hundred pictures I have of HDD's that smart status calls good that clearly are not, do yourself a favor (and your clients) don't use the smart status.

View attachment 3500

Some apps will interpret the value for reallocated sector count incorrectly, I see this most often on Fujitsu and Hitachi drives. Try that drive with Crystal Disk Info and see what it says. If the value for Reallocation Events Count is correct, that might well be enough to flunk the drive, but I would check that against a different app anyway.

Def cannot agree about SMART status.