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koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

koitsu to robman50

MVM

to robman50

Re: [hard drive] Does anyone know how to read the SMART data?

There are a multitude of other SMART monitoring and attribute gathering softwares out there.

Chances are Hitachi disks encode the RAW_VALUE field, so a very large value is completely legitimate. You have to understand that SMART attributes are not standardised per ACS/ATA standard -- they can be encoded in any way, and vendors do take advantage of this fact. Some software, such as smartmontools (only works on 2K/XP), know how to decode some of the raw values, but most others do not. Seagate tends to encode their attributes as well, such as their Hardware_ECC_Recovered attribute.

TL;DR -- if you see a very large RAW_VALUE field, chances are it could be encoded in said fashion. In this situation all you can do is look at the adjusted value (often labelled "Current" or "VALUE") and go off of that.

It's important that users know how to read SMART data before worrying about their hard disks. So many people just look at RAW_VALUE and go "OMG!!!!! IT'S 982348942393849283942893248932498324!@!$!%@!" and think it means something bad. That isn't the case.
robman50
join:2010-12-14

robman50

Member

My drive does sound loud but I forgot I disabled AAM/APM.
Access can be slow but that can be the O/S.
As for the SMART data, that one program gave my drive a 62% because of the spindle spinup. But maybe the 62% is still called a pass?

koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

koitsu

MVM

said by robman50:

My drive does sound loud but I forgot I disabled AAM/APM.
Access can be slow but that can be the O/S.
As for the SMART data, that one program gave my drive a 62% because of the spindle spinup. But maybe the 62% is still called a pass?

No. The software that you used is simply broken and makes the incorrect assumption that RAW_VALUE is equal to a literal value/number. As I described, this is not always the case, as SMART attributes can be encoded in any form (they are not standardised). My recommendation is to avoid the software in question and use something that doesn't try to "warn" you based on silly/bad assumptions of a developer who obviously doesn't understand SMART or read ACS/ATA specifications.
robman50
join:2010-12-14

robman50

Member

The manufacture diagnostics gave the drive a pass and so did the OEM diagnostics.
So I guess thats good enough?