Greetings, Matty.
Well, unless that's different than noted behavior before there were problems, that doesn't really indicate a bad drive any more than a drive/driver that doesn't support smartd. Smartd doesn't work on most sata drives with the sata driver included in the stock CentOS kernel.
smart does work, the default config from from redhat is wrong see bug #176835 and #187181. The output from smartctl used to be wrong. The correct command was sent by Alfred
Use '-d ata'. -d is for device type, not debug.
Hmm, and how about this:
[root@cappa etc]# smartctl -a /dev/sda smartctl version 5.33 [i686-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
Device: ATA ST3160812AS Version: 3.AA
SATA disks accessed via libata are not currently supported by smartmontools. When libata is given an ATA pass-thru ioctl() then an additional '-d libata' device type will be added to smartmontools.
Server has got CentOS4.4 installed, with two SATA discs, attached to an Intel SATA onboard controller. CentOS4.4 uses libata as a kernel module for it. The output from smartctl says all for itself.