Why didn't SMART warn me about my hard disk failure?

August 28, 2005 7:40 AM

Why didn't SMART warn me about my hard disk failure? It was definitely predictable: ominous clicking sounds were accompanied by increasing seek times. I was able to squeeze another week out of the drive before it died completely, and the whole time, SMART insisted that it was fine.

This was a 30 GB IBM Travelstar in an Apple TiBook running OS X 10.3.9. I'd prefer to know that SMART is working in case I don't see any future failure coming: are there any settings I should have tweaked to make it more sensitive? Is it an issue of my old PowerBook being unable to monitor effectively?

Before anybody lectures me, I do have a regular backup schedule in place for my data and realize that tools like SMART are no substitute.

posted by Eamon to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Whatever went wrong with the drive is something SMART doesn't monitor, probably. There are also stories out there of drives failing utterly only a few minutes after they give their first SMART warning. SMART only increases the odds that you'll know a drive is failing before it does. In this case it was superfluous anyway because you could hear it failing.

What SMART monitoring software are you using, BTW?
posted by kindall at 9:09 AM on August 28, 2005

from my experience with the linux smart tools, it seems that one has to ask the drive to run extended or short self-tests periodically to get any meaningful data back from the smart registers in the drive.

although OS 10.X reports the smart status, i have no evidence that it actually runs the self tests. i guess something interesting to do would be to take the disk out of one of my macs and put it on my linux box and dump the smart test log and see if there's anything in there.
posted by joeblough at 9:48 AM on August 28, 2005

p.s. seek times are definitely part of the smart test log.
posted by joeblough at 9:49 AM on August 28, 2005

kindall: I was just checking SMART status in disk utility. As joeblough mentioned, there don't seem to be any useful SMART utilities for self tests, etc. in OS X.
posted by Eamon at 9:47 AM on August 29, 2005

i didnt have time to do my experiment with linux. i was going to try via firewire but come to think of it a lot of the ATA disk control stuff is not implemented in the linux scsi stack, which is used in emulation for a firewire-connected disk. so i might have to tear everything apart and install the disk internally, which is more time than i can invest right now. maybe next time i upgrade one of my machines i'll try this.
posted by joeblough at 10:09 AM on August 29, 2005

Thanks for the input. I'll definitely try the same sometime soonish. Watch this space (until it's closed for comments)!
posted by Eamon at 6:01 PM on August 29, 2005

DiskWarrior comes with a background SMART monitor utility that, well, I can't vouch for the fact that it works, since I've not had a disk fail on me recently, but it certainly should work given who makes it.

SMARTReporter is a free alternative, but you should have DiskWarrior anyway, and warry your disks frequently.
posted by kindall at 12:08 AM on September 4, 2005

Well it looks like the latest stable release of smartmontools supports Darwin (with a few limitations, the most pressing of which is the inability to run short tests). I can't believe I didn't check that first!

I just installed it and viewed the log on my new drive, and no self-tests have been run. I'll do the same on a few other Macs later, but I expect to see the same. It's too bad Disk Utility doesn't offer a GUI for running SMART self-tests.
posted by Eamon at 9:38 PM on September 4, 2005