Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Testing a used hard drive to make SURE it is good.

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

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Sid Spry wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020, at 11:38 AM, Grant Edwards wrote:
>> Which is better than not knowing until the drive is failed and
>> offline. :)
>>
> But redundant if the drive degration is obvious. In two cases I
> can think of drives only reported SMART will-fail after the drives
> had hard failed. In the other cases performance was so degraded
> it was obvious it was the drive.
>
>


I've had two hard drive failures that SMART warned me about.  If not for
SMART I wouldn't have noticed the drives having issues until much
later.  Maybe even after losing a lot of data.  In both of those cases,
I lost no data at all.  I was able to recover everything off the drive. 

SMART can't predict the future so it can only monitor for the things it
can see.  If say a spindle bearing is about to lock up suddenly, SMART
most likely can't detect that since it is a hardware failure that can't
really be predicted.  We may be able to hear a strange sound if we lucky
but if it happens suddenly, it may not even do that.  While SMART can't
predict all points of failures, it can detect a lot of them.  Even if
the two drives I had failed with no warning from SMART, I'd still run it
and monitor it.  Using SMART can warn you in certain situations.  If a
person doesn't run SMART, they will miss those warnings. 

SMART isn't perfect but it is better than not having it all. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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