Just about how reliable are SMART tests?

[huckleberrypie]

Title says all. I do check SMART statuses as often as possible so I can keep tabs on my drive, but there are times when it gives out seemingly strange or flat-out crazy assertions. For example, the Disks utility in Ubuntu told me the drive is OK, albeit sprinkled with a few bad sectors, and while HD Tune Pro warned me about it, other utilities such as SpeedFan seemed to assume that it's still OK; it does warn me of pending sectors though.

[fzabkar]

All utilities receive exactly the same information from the drive. The difference is in how the tool's author interprets these values. I would prefer to see the actual SMART data and then make my own judgments. Those utilities that insist on interpreting the data without displaying the raw information are annoying and potentially misleading.

[harddrivespecialist]

SMART might not display correct values sometimes, but if you get warnings you should, at least, pay attention to what they are. Bad sectors tend to develop very quickly on the drive which is degrading.

[huckleberrypie]

SMART might not display correct values sometimes, but if you get warnings you should, at least, pay attention to what they are. Bad sectors tend to develop very quickly on the drive which is degrading.

True that, and even if the utility still labels it as "OK", I'd rather have the contents of it backed up than risk losing it.

[seed.helper]

smart tests are very reliable and helped me a lot

it can predict some failures

i had a problem with an hd wd green 4tb and when i saw read error rate trowing more and more errors i said to me time to backup... one weak later drive is dead ( cant read any data but doesnt click.... you can see the folders open the files but cant copy then without locking up computer.... doesnt matter i copyed all contents one week before ( all 4tb where copied fine before )

thanks to hard disk sentinel off course

in this case hard disk sentinel says the drive is 60% health ( but its dead)
smart cant detect a bad head

reading at 1MB/s 512 KB/s

writing at 90/110MB/s

weah drive is toasted


i have a samsung drive hd204ui that reporsts itself bad smart status backup and replace and its just running fine with one weak sector

go figure... already tested the surface and its fine