How smart is SMART now?

[Brink]

Your disks and SSDs have a self-monitoring function called SMART. But how good is it? The fine folks at Backblaze are back with data on how well SMART works for them.

SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a protocol for passing information from a disk or SSD to the CPU. It's part of the ATA and SCSI standards and is based on work by IBM, Seagate and others done in the '90s.

The protocol has a consistent data structure able to report over 70 statistics, but what gets measured is up to the vendor. SMART looks at the trends in these and other measures to determine if the drive is headed for failure.

Backblaze started tracking SMART data earlier this year on almost 40,000 drives to see if and how SMART could help predict drive failure. A drive failure is counted when the drive either won't power up, is bricked, or is showing (SMART) evidence of failing soon.

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[NoN]

Yeah, if Smart says "Ok", you can't trust it, fair enough...Its a bit of a guess and how you are servicing your drives & the power management they have, i recon. That's quite the only way to prevent a drive failure apart a bad design of the manufacturer side.
I'm checking time to time with the CrystalDiskInfo software the values, and do a full scan either with Macrorit Disk Scanner free or when i have plenty of time with the embedded Windows Chkdsk command. Most of the time, i "cross fingers"...

 

[snuffdaddy]

Like a car tyre, I just cross my fingers & hope it lasts until i make the next upgrade.

 

[Layback Bear]

Trusting SMART is like trusting your girlfriend around you wife. You really don't know what is going to happen.

 

[LMiller7]

SMART provides a valuable warning but you should never rely on it. You should make backups when everything is working well and not wait until you receive a warning. The time between receiving the warning and drive failure may be too short or one of many things may happen that SMART has no knowledge of. The drive electronics is just one of many. Electronic devices typically fail without warning or apparent cause.

Many warnings outside of computers work the same way. The "Check Engine" light in a car provides a useful warning that something may be wrong and action needs to be take. But the lack of the warning doesn't mean all is well.

 

[andrew129260]

Trusting SMART is like trusting your girlfriend around you wife. You really don't know what is going to happen.

lol good one.

SMART provides a valuable warning but you should never rely on it. You should make backups when everything is working well and not wait until you receive a warning. The time between receiving the warning and drive failure may be too short or one of many things may happen that SMART has no knowledge of. The drive electronics is just one of many. Electronic devices typically fail without warning or apparent cause.

Many warnings outside of computers work the same way. The "Check Engine" light in a car provides a useful warning that something may be wrong and action needs to be take. But the lack of the warning doesn't mean all is well.

I wish I could make a backup image of my car....

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Trusting SMART is like trusting your girlfriend around you wife. You really don't know what is going to happen.

Oh come on now, you know that will never end well.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

...I wish I could make a backup image of my car....

LOL! You and me three!

 

[NoN]

Well, seems the subject here has turned into a "smart" debate!!

 

[Alejandro85]

Reminds me of antiviruses. They're increasingly being proven as ineffective, yet people would happily trust their lives to them (their digital lives, that is ).

 

[groze]

SMART provides a valuable warning but you should never rely on it. You should make backups when everything is working well and not wait until you receive a warning. The time between receiving the warning and drive failure may be too short or one of many things may happen that SMART has no knowledge of. The drive electronics is just one of many. Electronic devices typically fail without warning or apparent cause.

Many warnings outside of computers work the same way. The "Check Engine" light in a car provides a useful warning that something may be wrong and action needs to be take. But the lack of the warning doesn't mean all is well.

Is Dell S.M.A.R.T. smarter? The reason I ask this. When I had the motherboard replaced under warranty, After replacing the motherboard he ran the bios system testing. The hard drive test include two S.M.A.R.T. type test plus some other type of test. It came back with no error messages.