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Is my drive still healthy (Seagate SSHD 1TB)?


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Hi,

I bought an SSHD drive in 2015. It has been running Windows flawlessly since then. Now I'm kinda concerned about the drive, 'cause Fedora (Linux) is reporting me that "Disk is OK" but "one attribute failed in the past". The attribute that failed the S.M.A.R.T test is the airflow temperature, which is fine, 'cause it has been stressed before and it reached temperatures like 55°C for a short amount of time. I then checked the other S.M.A.R.T attributes out of curiosity and I found out that Fedora is reporting some values as "Pre-Fail" and "Old-Age".

Should I be worried about it? Should I change my drive as soon as possible?

 

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Edited by FranceBB
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First thing first.

S.M.A.R.T. (what I personally call "D.U.M.B.[1]) is a failed attempt at pre-cognitive technology that invariably delivers almost - but not quite - entirely unlike reliable info.

The way the S.M.A.R.T. data is recorded (in non-standard ways) and the way it is interpreted (in non-standard ways) by largely un- or mis-documented non-standard tools on non-standard (and completely undocumented) devices are simply appalling, and how they are presented to the final user it is - if possible at all - even worse:

https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:smart_hdd_diagnostics

Quote

from smartctl man page:

Attributes are one of two possible types: Pre-failure or Old age.

Pre-failure Attributes are ones which, if less than or equal to their threshold values, indicate pending disk failure.

Old age, or usage Attributes, are ones which indicate end-of-product life from old-age or normal aging and wearout,

if the Attribute value is less than or equal to the threshold.

Please note: the fact that an Attribute is of type 'Pre-fail' does not mean that your disk is about to fail! It only has this meaning if the Attribute´s current Normalized value is less than or equal to the threshold value.

The ONLY (and only partially) meaningful S.M.A.R.T. parameters that may predict an imminent failure are reporterdly:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-smart-stats-indicate-hard-drive-failures/

5, 187,188,197,198 and - possibly - 189.

They are all just fine on your disk drive.

14 hours ago, FranceBB said:

Should I be worried about it? Should I change my drive as soon as possible?

Solution 1:

Flip a coin.

If it comes out head, YES, you should change the device as soon as possible, if it comes out tails, NO, your device is just fine.

(the above test, on average, has the same accuracy than a S.M.A.R.T. diagnosis)

Repeat the test every 6 to 12 months.

Compare with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism

Solution 2:

Make sure you have a recent, reliable backup of data.

Make sure you have a second copy of the above backup, on a different media and possibly kept in a separate location.

Keep maintaining the two copies of backup.

Live a happy and long life, without worries :) about the device failing.

When the SSHD device will fail, it will fail [2], just get a new one and restore from the backup.

 

jaclaz

 

[1] Definitely Unreliable Measurement Bull§hit

[2] ... and it will fail without any warning, and surely not a warning coming from S.M.A.R.T. data, or it will simply continue to buzz along happily until you will have changed the whole computer ...

 

Edited by jaclaz
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5 minutes ago, Mcinwwl said:

On some other board, someone recommended using program HDDScan or similar and checking the number of LBA blocks with high access time (over 300 ms).

Check out here: https://safegroup.pl/thread-10938.html if you have patience to play with Google translate.

Yep :), only issue being that on a SSHD :whistle::

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive

you won't know if reads are cached or not, that may be a huge roadblock to this otherwise nice plan.

BTW a number of slow sectors (in reading) does not say much about the reliability of a drive.

Talking of conventional drives, anecdotally I have a machine equipped with a very, very old SAMSUNG (around 4.1 GB in size - I know, I know) that had a number of "slow sectors", that at the time I got for free (discarded because owner thought it was nearly dead) and that happily spinned away 24/7 since 2001 (that is roughly 16 years, I replaced the whole machine in March or April 2017 only because I needed to update the OS - NT 4.00 - for other reasons. ).

jaclaz

 

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24 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

you won't know if reads are cached or not, that may be a huge roadblock to this otherwise nice plan.

You got me here, my fault.

24 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

Talking of conventional drives, anecdotally I have a machine equipped with a very, very old SAMSUNG (around 4.1 GB in size - I know, I know) that had a number of "slow sectors", that at the time I got for free (discarded because owner thought it was nearly dead) and that happily spinned away 24/7 since 2001 (that is roughly 16 years, I replaced the whole machine in March or April 2017 only because I needed to update the OS - NT 4.00 - for other reasons. ).

Which takes us back to the point, that predicting if a drive will be dead or not, is a guessing game.

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7 hours ago, Mcinwwl said:

Which takes us back to the point, that predicting if a drive will be dead or not, is a guessing game.

Sez you! Any perfectly tuned good quality crystal ball is able to do it with 100% reliability every Feb 29, during the total part of a lunar eclipse, as you should well know, by now. :yes:

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