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SMART predicting imminent failure but all SMART attributes show green


sickyd

Question

Overnight Scanner service read the SMART details of a Seagate 6TB drive and decided that the drive is in imminent danger of failure and started evacuating the drive. However, all the Attributes are showing as green.

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Same model drive in this machine has similar attributes, but is not predicting failure. 

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I noticed both drives are using generic interpretation rules. I triggered an interpretation rule update to be sure there weren't wrong rules being applied. CrystalDiskInfo shows no problem with either drive. I would appreciate any help interpreting what is going on and why Scanner thinks one drive is about to fail.

bitflock ID: UZQVUP9L

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If Scanner is suggesting the drive might fail, then I would try to move that data off and get that drive offline as fast as possible. Once offline, then I would suggest running some diagnostics on the empty drive. You already have Scanner, but I would also suggest downloading the free version of Hard Disk Sentinel for a second opinion. 

In my experience, once these monitoring programs detect something they don't like, it is best practice to assume imminent drive failure. Only once did my programs detect a false positive on a drive. I removed all data from it and took it offline. Fortunately, I was able to put that drive back into service after running a number of diagnostics on it to verify it was still good. All my other drives failed within a few days from first detection of any problems, and one drive just failed without warning.

There are just so many attributes that these programs monitor that I don't really understand why "similar" reading on drives might indicate pending failure on one drive but not on the other. And I have also seen all Green attributes on a drive that is reported as pending failure. So there might be attributes way down at a much lower level than we see that are causing concern.

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Thanks for the insight. I installed HD Sentinel and it is saying the Spin Retry is the cause of the failure prediction. Which is interesting because Scanner shows that with a value of 0. Aren't these SMART values stored on the disk itself? How can each program shows different values? Are they displaying differing interpretations?

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The problem is that SMART is not a strictly formalised standard; every manufacturer has their own implementation (sometimes differing even between models) using different scales and ranges and formats. Manufacturer A might use values between 100 and 199 at location 235 to measure an aspect of their drives while Manufacturer B might use values between 0 and 65535 at location 482 for that same aspect; and those values may not even be in the same scale (e.g. celsius vs kelvin vs fahrenheit for temperature). And so on ad nauseum.

This means that if the particular SMART software you're using doesn't have a translation of whatever proprietary implementation it encounters sufficient to know that A=B means "bad" (and also track stuff like "not bad yet but it is getting worse"), it then has to rely entirely on whether (and when) the drive itself flags the results as "bad".

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1 hour ago, Shane said:

The problem is that SMART is not a strictly formalised standard; every manufacturer has their own implementation (sometimes differing even between models) using different scales and ranges and formats. Manufacturer A might use values between 100 and 199 at location 235 to measure an aspect of their drives while Manufacturer B might use values between 0 and 65535 at location 482 for that same aspect; and those values may not even be in the same scale (e.g. celsius vs kelvin vs fahrenheit for temperature). And so on ad nauseum.

This means that if the particular SMART software you're using doesn't have a translation of whatever proprietary implementation it encounters sufficient to know that A=B means "bad" (and also track stuff like "not bad yet but it is getting worse"), it then has to rely entirely on whether (and when) the drive itself flags the results as "bad".

So if Scanner is using a generic interpretation rule on the drive, it may not be interpreting the drive correctly? Or should the interpretation rules be generally well developed for the major brands and models?

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