SMART false alarms?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tom Del Rosso
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Tom Del Rosso

One PC gave a SMART imminent failure warning 10 days ago and again a week
later. The system has a new Maxtor 250GB and a 5 year old Fujitsu 6 GB
drive that both support SMART, but the warning doesn't specify any drive.
(Valuable data is backed up daily to the small drive. When it needed an
upgrade I jumped it up to 250 because they were on sale, but the space isn't
needed yet.) I can't find a utility for Fujitsu, but Maxtor's test ran on
both and passed both.

What do you make of that?

Is there another utility I can try? I own a one-version-old copy of
Spinrite but it proved useless at fixing modern drives so I don't know if I
should bother using it just to detect problems.

The system is cold-booted every day but gave no warnings in the in-between
days. Is that because SMART clears it's warning flag and gives a new
warning when there is a new set of problem sectors, or does it just repeat
the same warning periodically?
 
One PC gave a SMART imminent failure warning 10 days ago and again a week
later. The system has a new Maxtor 250GB and a 5 year old Fujitsu 6 GB
drive that both support SMART, but the warning doesn't specify any drive.
(Valuable data is backed up daily to the small drive. When it needed an
upgrade I jumped it up to 250 because they were on sale, but the space isn't
needed yet.) I can't find a utility for Fujitsu, but Maxtor's test ran on
both and passed both.

What do you make of that?
Click to expand...

The small drive probably just passed it's expected lifespan. I forget
what the exact name for the counter is, but I've got some older drives
that show warnings for that as well. The other SMART counters all show
normal or passing levels so I continue to use those drives in some
non-critical systems.
Is there another utility I can try?
Click to expand...

Everest from http://www.lavalys.com/ is free and you can check the SMART
counters under the Storage section.
 
Thanks. I just tried Activesmart but it just froze me up. Now I'll take a
look at Everest.
Click to expand...



Its very buggy only reports SMART on 3 drives out of 4, then its not the same
drive that is missing the SMART Info.


No problems with other SMART Programs..

Plus no support..
 
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