I finally got a S.M.A.R.T. message!

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I finally got a S.M.A.R.T. message!

SMART failure predicted on hard disk 0: ????????????
WARNING: Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive A failure may be imminent

I hate to be so happy during a hard disk failure, but I gotta say it was kinda cool to get a SMART message telling me that my hard drive will fail soon in the future. Why am I so excited that I'm going to lose all the data on my hard disk? It's not because I have all the data backed up; even though they are mostly backed up because this is just my game machine with nothing but games on it. The reason that I am so excited is that in my lifetime experience of using PC's, I have never ever seen a SMART message telling me that my hard drive is about to go broken! Hey, S.M.A.R.T. has been available on hard disks since 1992 (over 13 years ago). And not one time have I seen a SMART message. In those thirteen years, I have had several major hard disk crashes. So I think this is pretty cool.

The weird thing is that after I shut down the computer and booted it up again, the SMART message didn't show a second time. Now will this hard disk really crash and burn? Did the drive use its intelligence to fix itself? I'll find out and keep you posted.

Chieh Cheng
Mon, 12 Dec 2005 18:56:04 -0800

Today, I downloaded the Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics utilities for Windows. This tool is available on Western Digital's web site free of charge. I wanted to see exactly what's causing the S.M.A.R.T. message and what I could do about it.

After installing the software tool, I ran the diagnostics and immediately see a SMART Status - FAIL (see picture below).

Attached Image:

S.M.A.R.T. Fail.png

Chieh Cheng
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:34:28 -0800

Double-clicking on the Fail message brought up the SMART Disk Information (see picture below). From this page, it appears that the drive's raw read error rate is extremely high. Everything else seems to be working just fine.

But I don't know how to read these attributes, because the next attribute seems to have exceeded the threshold as well, though the status screen indicated that it is ok.

Attached Image:

S.M.A.R.T. Disk Information.png

Chieh Cheng
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:39:32 -0800

After reading the "Crash Prevention" article (see Related Links below), I have determined how to read this information table. The following paragraph is an excerpt from the argicle:

"The VALUE column has the current value, WORST has the worst measured value so far, and THRESH the factory threshold value. A current value equal to, or below, the threshold value indicates an error condition for the attribute in question."

Chieh Cheng
Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:10:48 -0800

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