[clug] Warning message

[Chris Smart]

Further, studies of hard drives that Google and the like have done seem
to show that SMART doesn't really help a whole lot. Part of the reason
for this is that the technical people install a full blown SMART system
on a hard drive, but marketing get it turned off because it "makes their
hard drives look less reliable than the competitors". Which is
unfortunate for the consumer.

-c

On Sun, 2008-05-04 at 10:30 +1000, David Tulloh wrote:
> keith sayers wrote:
> > 	I have recently moved to Suse 10.3 and when I log on I get a pair of warning 
> > messages :
> > 	Your hard disk drive is failing!  S.M.A.R.T. message :
> > 	Device : /dev/sda, 4294967292 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
> > and :
> > 	Your hard disk is failing!  S.M.A.R.T. message :
> > 	Device: /dev/sda, 4294967292. Offline uncorrectable sectors
> >
> > 	So far as I know there is nothing wrong with either of my hard drives - could 
> > anyone explain this please and perhaps tell me what I should do?
> >   
> SMART is a system where the hard drive tries to warn of an impending 
> failure.  It's not perfect, my understanding is that occasionally you 
> will get SMART warnings and the drive will live for years, occasionally 
> it will fail without any warning.
> 
> Personally the annoyance and pain of losing a hard drive vastly 
> outweighs the cost, so I would believe it and replace the drive as soon 
> as possible.
> 
> 
> David