SMART testing has been around for a while and isn’t very well understood. I can’t say that I’m an expert on it, but I’ve come to have several fairly well developed ideas in regards to it. First off, if I have a live hard drive that fails to complete a SMART test, it’s time for me to retire that drive. It may seem extravagant, but I would rather not have to spend loads of time recovering data of a potentially failing drive. It’s true that SMART is not necessarily going to raise a red flag before a significant data loss event happens. In fact, I’ve seen drives report that they’ve passed the health test in spite of some serious disk problems. What I think you ought to look out for are a few of these points:

The parameter that I really like to keep an eye out for is the Reallocated_Sector_Ct These shows how many disk sectors have had to be moved in the lifetime of the disk. If you’re disk is at 0 that’s a pretty good sign, if that number increases each time you run it…. very bad sign.

Along with it I like to see how close the following stats are to their “threshholds” and what kind of fluctuation there is between runs:

Raw_Read_Error_Rate
Seek_Error_Rate
Hardware_ECC_Recovered
Offline_Uncorrectable

Temperature can be a KILLER of drives, so if SMART reports your drive is constantly near or over the failure threshold there, you should look into better cooling and line up a replacement drive just in case (as the lifespan of the disk will likely be shorter.)

For all of the smart stats, you’ll see value, worst and threshold. Threshold is the value it needs to reach before claiming that parameter to be in “failure”, worst would be the most severe number recorded and value represents the current reading in that continuum. It’s worth looking at those numbers on the whole to see just HOW close to the threshold some of the stats are.

For instance, I recall a drive that I was asked to look at. The system was exhibiting peculiar freezes and crashes. Smart reported the drive to be healthy, but…. reallocated sector count increased each time I saw the SMART stats. I was asked if we could get an RMA replacement on that fact alone and suggested that we only had to wait a few more tests to see that truly fail. (Their concern was that it was still claiming to be HEALTHY in the overall smart test in spite of rapidly approaching it’s threshold value. Sure enough one or two more tests it finally hit threshold and FAILED the health assessment.

S.M.A.R.T. is a self monitoring and reporting tool built into every modern hard drive. Did you know that you can use an ubuntu linux boot cd to check that smart status and run SMART tests on your drive? This is the same boot cd that you can use to test out or install the ubuntu linux environment, but you can do the SMART testing without installing linux on your hard drive.

How?

To start out you need an ubuntu boot cd, then you’ll need to put the cd in the drive and reboot your machine. You may need to adjust boot options in bios (or if there is a message that says for other boot device press f12 you may need to press f12 to make the system boot from cd.) When the system boots open up a terminal window (Applications/Accessories/Terminal) Type in the following

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install smartmontools

(Smartmontools is the package for smart monitoring and reporting under linux.)

After that’s successfully done you should be able to use the same terminal window to type…

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda (or /dev/hda) and get a detailed report of all SMART info on your first hard drive.

If you want to do a test you can do the following
sudo smartctl -t short /dev/sda
or
sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sda

the short test is usually a two minute test, the long test can take an hour or so.

After the test runs you can return to the command above:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
to see the status of all the parameters that are tracked on your hard drive as well as the testing log.

Many times I’ve used Ubuntu’s livecd to test out an ailing system, but more than once I’ve wanted to add a utility, yes you can apt-get install from the live cd, but that assumes the system has a working internet connection, it’s sometimes better to just build the cd yourself with the tools YOU want. Using the tips in this forum thread and this page, with help from this google search, I remastered my own custom version of ubuntu (with smartmontools among other things.) I consider the ability to make your own custom tools priceless when it comes to tech support.

Here’s a twist – make a cd from your ubuntu install with remastersys.