Paul Heinlein <heinlein at ...> writes: > > On Mon, 27 Jan 2014, Bob Hepple wrote: > > > I've got a 1Tb USB disc that appears to be dying - eg it took about > > 10 days (!) to run 'badblocks -nsv /dev/sdc' and it only did less > > than 2% in that time. Read access became _really_ slow. > > > > 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 192 192 000 Old_age Always > > - 1423 > > 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 196 196 000 Old_age Offline > > - 700 > > 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 001 001 000 Old_age Offline > > - 793265 > > These numbers are all bad, really bad. Regardless of the overall > PASSED result, SMART is telling you that the disk is failing. See, > e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. > Thanks for that. I kinda wonder about the 'PASSED' in light of this - looks like we need to go through the smartctl output with a fine toothcomb to make it valuable. The disc was already headed to the dump as it was obviously failing, but I would have liked to be able to use smartctl to predict failures. When the output is so hard to read, I doubt it'll happen. For anyone following this, I found http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/FAQ quite good reading. Also http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/badblockhowto.html