[CentOS] smartctl: is my disc dying?

Tue Jan 28 05:27:21 UTC 2014
Bob Hepple <bob.hepple at gmail.com>

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