Re: [9fans] SMART: Silly Marketing Acronym, Rebuts Truth

[tlaronde@polynum.com]

On Sat, Feb 03, 2018 at 03:59:26PM -0800, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> >The interesting thing (for me) was that
> >the SMART data from the drive gave it an all clear right to the end. But
> >unlike the SSDs, there was plenty of behavioural warning to remind me to
> >have the backups up to date and a spare at the ready...
>
> FWIW, of the three-four dozen or so drives I have actively SMART monitored
> over the years, of the ones that failed, *not* *one* gave a SMART warning
> before dying.
>
> That includes a spinny disk in one of my Mac Minis.  Of anyone, I would
> expect Apple to be in bed with their HD suppliers enough to have HD firmware
> that reliably reports SMART errors (since the disk utilities do pay
> attemtion to it).  I spent a month listening to that drive's heads slam back
> to the home position as it tried to recalibrate itself, before eventually
> dying. To the bitter end, SMART reported "a-ok boss!"
>

I had the same experience. SMART has been totally useless advertising
problems only _after_ the disks had failed, repeating "reliable" till
disaster. The OSes log were more helpful since the read and write errors
were reported (corrected) days or even weeks before the disks became
useless---and fortunately, I relied on this information to swap data.
--
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                       http://www.sbfa.fr/
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