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| | | New Member
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 8/12/2003 11:13 PM
Posts: 5, Visits: 1 |
| Hi all,
A little background ... about nine months ago I had to return a Maxtor HD because the BIOS began detecting SMART errors. The drive, though, checked out fine with every other peice of software I used--not so much as a bad sector.
While waiting for a warranty replacement drive, I purchased a new Seagate. The Seagate has now also begun predicting failure. Again, chkdsk, scandisk etc don't report any errors. Seagate's own diagnostic reports SMART errors, but otherwise doesn't seem to find any operating errors.
I now suspect a bad cable. Is there anyway to "reset" the SMART attributes to get a more accurate idea of the drives actual condition?
Sorry this is so long, just wanted to paint an accurate picture.
Thanks,
Allan |
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Forum Advisor
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Last Login: 10/17/2007 6:42 PM
Posts: 1,081, Visits: 372 |
| I never knew that SMART drive needed resetting.
I would think that you could just replace the cable and try the drive.
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Senior Forum Advisor
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Last Login: 7/14/2006 12:11 PM
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| Sometimes the BIOS may be screwed. The best way to check this is to do the following:
1) Remove the partition(s) through FDISK
2) Create a Primary DOS Partition spanning the whole drive and watch carefully during the two integrity checks it's performing; if it restarts often (back to 0%), then you got a problem
3) If nothing happened before, reboot the system with a bootable floppy again and format the drive; take note of any bad sectors that are reported
If everything was fine both with the integrity checks and the format, it's a BIOS problem. If a newer BIOS version is available, install it and check again. If the problem still occurs, disable SMART.
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| | | New Member
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Last Login: 8/12/2003 11:13 PM
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| Wow, quick responses
I'll give it a shot later, Thomas, thanks!
Allan |
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Senior Member
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Last Login: 8/24/2006 7:13 PM
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| smart is stupid. if a maxtor is throwing a smart, run powermax on it, and when it comes up clean , realize that smart errors get tossed out for no usefull reason.
one guy said smart will detect that a drive is ABOUT to die, if that was true, i got a few drives that should be dead :-) and they dont get a single bit error after hours of I/O using the majority of the disk.
if the drive was about to die and it throws a smart error, WHY then after hours of testing it with the manufacturers software (in my case) did it never throw a smart error?
so i agree with thomas, check the bios, upgrade if nessisary, check the drivers for the hard drive controller, then quit beating your head against it, cause its wrong . . . well  sometimes its wrong.
OK, so i am Guessing, but i try hard  |
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Senior Forum Advisor
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Last Login: 1/1/2005 12:48 PM
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| If I were you I would change the cable and continue to monitor for errors. SMART attributes measure things like retries to read or write data and these are indicators that there may be something wrong with the electronics in the drive and not the physical disk itself.
There were some drives that had a bad algorithm and the SMART attributes were exceeded too quickly so upgrading the drive firmware may be something you want to try.
As far as I am concerned SMART and DST (drive self test) are good early warning indicators and should never be disabled.
Cheers
Andy
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Senior Forum Advisor
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| | [QUOTE=Andy-S] (...) these are indicators that there may be something wrong with the electronics in the drive and not the physical disk itself. [/QUOTE]
True, but wouldn't that have an impact on the regular drive checking as well? Integrity checks restarting, format "freezing" a couple times, sectors marked bad once but not next time?
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Senior Forum Advisor
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 1/1/2005 12:48 PM
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| TC,
That was just an example. Some of the other checks done by SMART are head floating height, data throughput performance, spin-up time, seek error rate, seek time performance, and drive calibration retry count. These will not be picked up by your standard chkdsk utilities etc.
As I said before my opinion is that you should never disable SMART as it monitors areas of the drive that you will not be able to check easily with other utilities.
Cheers
Andy
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