Interpreting S.M.A.R.T data

What do the numbers inside the brackets and outside them mean?

The first 2 numbers are known as best and worse, tolerances set by the manufacturer which only apply to certain attributes.

The numbers on the right hand side are the actual S.M.A.R.T. data values associated with the attributes.

For more information have a look at - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

Richard S.

My status is Good. Is that all that I need to be concerned with? GHG09.jpg

One of my old hard drives has a reallocation sector count of 000000001 and Speecy say "Good", I'm not sure if I would agree with that assessment.

Using HD Tune it highlights reallocation sector count to indicate a possible problem I think Speecy should do something similar. :)

Richard S.

I didn't pay much attention to SMART until Knighmare posted the concern over Spin Retry Count, at which time I checked Wiki.

Wiki's tutorial is as clear as mud.

I show four columns of numbers. The first I presume is some kind of index.

The second column, mostly 100s, is for best numbers?

The third column, also mostly (100s), means worst?

If the second and third cols are identical, then it's best and worst at the same time!

The fourth column, oh how they love 0s, is reading my HDD?

So, I have a Start/Stop Count of 00000002ED and my drive's condition is good / bad / unknown?, cos 2ED is nowhere near 100. :P

Start/Stop Count has nothing to do with Spin Retry Count, read the wikipedia page the important stuff are highlighted - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

You should only start to worry about your hard drive if:

- hear metallic clicking noises

- very slow booting, poor file access performance.

- desktop periodically freezing i.e. no mouse movement.

- Windows keeps switching IDE transfer from DMA to PIO Mode.

- High DPC Latency / Interrupts (as seen via Process Explorer)

- Reallocated Sector count is above 0 and rising.

- "Disk" events with "Bad Block" in System event logs (eventvwr.exe)

- Drive temperature rises quickly to 60C+ while the motherboard is much cooler.

Richard S.

One of my old hard drives has a reallocation sector count of 000000001 and Speecy say "Good", I'm not sure if I would agree with that assessment.

Using HD Tune it highlights reallocation sector count to indicate a possible problem I think Speecy should do something similar. :)

Richard S.

Do you recall if at any point while using your older hard drive, there was either a power glitch or a sudden power outage while the hard drive could have been writing data to the disk? If so, then what can happen is that the drive heads are momentarily still writing data to the disk while at the same time the sudden loss of power is causing the drive heads to swing to the head parking position. The result can be a sector or sectors in which the factory low level formatted sector header information has been overwritten with corrupt data, and the sector or sectors will permanently show up as bad sectors which have been reallocated. Thus, the drive is perfectly fine and is not failing at all, but S.M.A.R.T. still has a log of the reallocated sector(s). A true sign of a failing drive would be seeing increasing values for the reallocation sector count. If you don't, then the drive is fine.