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

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

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> 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!"

--lyndon

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

[Bakul Shah]

On Feb 3, 2018, at 3:59 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca> 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 have only monitored disks @ home and for them SMART does report
all sorts of things. For recalibration to have kicked in, you should seeing
lots of errors. It’s possible Apple s/w dumbs it down & presents just one
binary choice to the user but the underlying data should be there. It’s
usually host s/w that falls short. Given disks’ bathtub error curve, s/w
should show error rate as a graph (as a function of time) from the
beginning and recommend replacement as the rate starts climbing
again. Ideally it should even compare it with averaged error data
collected by the vendor. History and good visualization can be very
helpful.

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

[tlaronde]

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/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

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

[Erik Quanstrom]

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

[tlaronde]

On Sun, Feb 04, 2018 at 10:10:39AM -0800, Erik Quanstrom wrote:
>in my experience smart can be helpful diagnosing grey failures. but it's useless to generalize about hdd or ssd firmware wrt smart data.

<rant>I suspect that the huge majority of technical resources is
nowadays put on improving the manufacture process so that 99% of
the devices will last the duration of the guarantee... but not
longer. Since when SMART reports problems, the disk will finally
fail but several days or weeks after, this is the grey part you
are talking about: near the end of the guarantee but not already
pass the guarantee. So SMART can not advertise the failure (because
the device is still under guarantee) but not lie totally (to incit
you to buy another one). The question the marketing
department doesnt ask itself is whether a customer, seeing that the
device fails just after the guarantee is void, will have an incentive to
buy the same brand. Even if "everybody" (all the brands including the
"no brand"---that manufacture in fact for the brands) does the
same, the brand I have not tested yet has the benefit of the
doubt...</rant>

--
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                       http://www.sbfa.fr/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C