smartctl -l error /dev/... When to worry ?

[Randy Kelsoe]

Hannes Mayer wrote:

> I get this for hdb:
>   9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   
> Always       -       646543
> which I assume is in minutes, so that would be almost 449 days.
> The errors occured at day 224, so that is pretty old.

What brand of drive is this? Some drives keep the power_on_hours in 
minutes. 

> hdb is the slave on my IDE bus, currently with FC2.
> hda is the master with windoze running idle 99% of the time, just 
> mounting it
> from FC2 from time to time.
>
> hdf was the slave with hdb, when hdb still had windoze on it.
>
> OK, so for hdf we have:
> 5368 hours = 224 days
>   9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   237   237   000    Old_age   
> Always       -       16981
> 16981 hours = 707.5 days
>
> So these errors are pretty old too.
>
> But I get confused by the Power_On_Hours. Can this value be altered in 
> some way ?
> hdb has 449 days and hdf 707 days, but hdb is in use for a much longer 
> time...

This could be buggy firmware. I see on the smartmontools page that, for 
example, some Maxtor drives did not update the timer when the drive was 
in idle mode, and that caused the timer to show a lot less time than the 
drive actually had on it.

While I was there, I also saw this, which is similar to what you are seeing:

# *What's this smartctl message mean?: Warning: ATA error count 9 
inconsistent with error log pointer 5*

# The ATA error log is stored in a circular buffer, and the ATA 
specifications are unambiguous about how the entries should be ordered. 
This warning message means that the disk's firmware does not strictly 
obey the ATA specification regarding the ordering of the error log 
entries in the circular buffer. Smartmontools will correct for this 
oversight, so this warning message can be safely ignored by users. (On 
the other hand, firmware engineers: please read the ATA specs more 
closely then fix your code!).