> My scepticism regarding SMART data continues ... the flaky drive >showed no errors, and a full test and full zero-write using the WD >diagnostics revealed no errors either. If the drive is bad, there's >no evidence that would cause WD to issue an RMA. I've been having a rash of drive failures recently and I have come to trust SMART. One thing's for sure - SMART is not implemented the same on all drives or controllers. Recently one older Seagate drive showed no SMART capability in linux using the gnome-disk-utility, but I could read the SMART data from the drive in Windows with HD Tune. It isn't infallible, but SMART is certainly one tool you can use in the diagnosis. I wouldn't ignore Reallocated Sector counts or Current Pending Sector counts, for instance. Working for a customer this weekend, I replaced an older 60G WD drive that I knew for months to have bad sectors, but the Reallocated Sector Count was still 0. After a scan for errors with HD Tune, the Current Pending sector count showed 13, but the Reallocated Sector Count never grew. There is still a lot for me to learn - like the relationship between SMART within the drive and the controller's support of SMART. You would think they are independent of each other, but I wonder...