Confirmed premature hard disk failure

David Nielsen gnomeuser at gmail.com
Wed Dec 31 13:47:02 UTC 2008


2008/12/31 Chuck Anderson <cra at wpi.edu>

> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 07:21:26PM -0600, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> >   5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 197 197 140 Pre-fail Always - 19
> > 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 192 190 000 Old_age Always - 86
>
> > off until now. 6 and 7 are from when I first noticed
> > Current_Pending_Sector was nonzero, maybe a month or two ago. 8 is from
> > my post in July. 9 and 10 are from when the drive was new.
>
> > 1) The SMART health status is PASSED. Just like every other failed drive
> > I've had...
>
> Don't look at that alone.
>
> > 2) None of the attributes are failed.
>
> I consider > 0 on Current_Pending_Sector or Reallocated_Sector_Ct to
> be failing.
>
> > 3) By the time the self tests start failing, it is too late, you are
> > already losing data.
>
> If Current_Pending_Sector or Reallocated_Sector_Ct increases > 0,
> replace the drive immediately.
>
> > We can not trust the drive to assess itself properly. If we ever get a
> > SMART desktop alert thing going, we MUST look directly at the
> > attributes, and come to our own conclusion.
>
> Yes, we should consider any drive to be failed if it gets any pending
> or reallocated sectors.
>
> > Any questions before I RMA the drive?
>
> Why did you wait until you had many pending/reallocated sectors before
> RMAing it instead of RMAing it as soon as you had 1 bad sector?


I wonder if this new wonder tool davidz is working on Devicekit-disks will
be able to give the user some more understandable warnings in this area. I
e.g. have in the past 1½ years lost 3 drives, probably all problems of which
I could have gotten early warnings and taken action instead of weeping over
spilled data.

- David
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