SMART Hard Drive Warning

[mdklassen]

Manufacturer Kingston
Product Family SSDNow
Form Factor 2.5-inch
Sectors 976,768,065
SATA type SATA-III 6.0Gb/s
Device type Fixed
Speed 5400 RPM
Features S.M.A.R.T., APM, NCQ
Max. Transfer Mode SATA III 6.0Gb/s
Used Transfer Mode SATA II 3.0Gb/s
Interface USB (SATA)
Capacity 465 GB
Real size 500,107,861,504 bytes
S.M.A.R.T    Status Unknown
Partition 0
Partition ID Disk #1, Partition #0
Size 512 MB

Partition 1
Partition ID Disk #1, Partition #1
Size 465 GB

I am guessing that the above output was generated when you used an external SATA-to-USB2 adapter to attach a Kingston SSDNow solid-state disk to a computer.  That connection-method inhibits the ability of SPECCY to pull the SMART values from the disk-drive.    Hence, the "Status Unknown" report, and the lack of SMART measurements.

Also, the "speed" value for an internally-connected SSD is reported as "Not used (SSD Drive)", not 5400 RPM.  Weird.

SPECCY works best when the disk-drive is connected to an "internal" SATA port.

--------------

Just for comparison, below is the drive that I know has bad sectors on it.  I pulled it out of the trash to do this test.

Attribute name Real value Current Worst Threshold Raw Value Status
01 Read Error Rate 0
05 Reallocated Sectors Count 0
07 Seek Error Rate 0
B8 End-to-End error / IOEDC 0
BB Reported Uncorrectable Errors 0

BF G-sense error rate 134 100 100 0 0000000086 Good
C2 Temperature 43 °C
C3 Hardware ECC Recovered 0
C5 Current Pending Sector Count 0
C6 Uncorrectable Sector Count 0
C7 UltraDMA CRC Error Count 0

I do not see any "Bad" items in the above report.  In fact, everything looks good.

Even Reallocated Sectors Count  is zero -- the disk-drive has some "spare" sectors, but it has not used any of them.

Just for "fun", try:    CHKDSK  letter: /R

to have CHKDSK scan _every_ sector on the disk-drive, which could take hours, to look for the "bad" sectors that you claim that are existing on the disk-drive.  This may force the disk-drive to employ some of those "spare" sectors.

So, rerun SPECCY after CHKDSK has completed, to look for changes in the numbers.

[Ton21]

I connected both of them the exact same way via usb to SATA adapter. On the old drive that originally gave me problems the SMART was detected by SPECCY. The new drive's SMART features were not detected. I'm not sure what the difference would be between them. (Same type of connection & same type of disk)

When connected to the computer that I am trying to fix the old disk would not take an OS installation.

The new one would, but I still get the SMART imminent hard drive failure warning. When I run the SMART hard disk check:
1) the new drive says not found or available

2) The old one gives me a code that HP wouldn't give me the answer to since the warranty is expired.

I ran a badblocks test with a live linux USB distro and there were hundreds of them.

I decided to purchase a new hard disk when I saw this. The new disk took an OS, but still gave me warnings. The company that sold me the disk (laptoppartsexpert) sent me another one when I told them the new disk was giving me the warning so I put that one in and I'm still getting the same warning. I haven't installed an OS on that one (2nd new disk) yet.

Do you feel that running chdisk from windows will yeild different results than badblocks on linux?

[mdklassen]

On a working computer capable of running SPECCY under Windows, it is possible to disconnect the "data" and "power" cables from the (SATA, I hope) CD/DVD drive, and connect those 2 cables to either the "recycled" disk-drive or the Kingston SSDNow drive or the "brand-new" drive, boot up the computer, run SPECCY, and capture the SMART report for each disk?

[Ton21 · Accepted solution]

Hello!  

I figured out a solution.  Aparently for new hard disks, the SMART monitoring features are disabled by default!  ??  Wow!  This feature can be toggled on or off at will.

I found this by using a bootable USB of Ubuntu Mate on the HP Pavilion 11n010dx with the brand new blank hard disk (without an os) installed.  Of course I got the SMART warning about failure upon startup but I bypassed it by pressing enter to boot from the USB.  

While poking around, from the System menu I chose Hard Disks and found a toggle switch to activate SMART.  When I did this and rebooted it worked as expected.  I installed Ubuntu Mate normally and it seems to be fine.  No more SMART warnings!

I guess this was the reason that the Hard Disk Check (from F2 at startup) said that SMART was unavailable.  Probably also the reason why SPECCY couldn't give me any SMART data on the new drive.

This can also be done from CLI using smartclt from smartmontools.

I am still not sure about the old disk.  I ran e2fsck -cv to find bad blocks and add them to the bad blocks inode. I ran it for 15hours and it was only about 1% done with about 2500 bad blocks found!  I didn't check it with chdisk from Windows yet.  It is interesting that SPECCY said it was fine even after not being bootable from windows 8.1 and not being able to take another OS.  

Thank you for all of you help!

[mdklassen]

> It is interesting that SPECCY said it was fine even after not being bootable from windows 8.1 and not being able to take another OS.  

SPECCY can only report the values that SMART has been collecting.

So, a tool that actually read/writes each sector, such as CHKDSK under Windows (or something under *nix) or "short DST [Drive Status Test] or "long-elapsed-time DST", is needed to physically test every sector (and, I presume, for SMART on the disk-drive to collect more measurements).

I am a little surprised that none of those "bad" sectors have been swapped-out, and logically replaced by the "spare" sectors on the disk-drive.

[Kazakan]

hi Chimmey_83 ,  if i install OS in ssd and encountered this error (301)  , will i have replace this ssd ?

[kevin-t]

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