Question about SMART

[Alan Cox]

> > destructive mode) as well as checking the NTFS one in Windows 7.  No 
> > problems where reported.  The question is should I really believe what 
> > SMART is telling me or is it just  stupid :-)
> > 
> > There are no disk errors reported or any other issues that might 
> > indicate the drive is going bad.
> 
> It might help to see the smartctl output.

The Fedora tool is broken, it's best removed from the system until (if
ever) someone fixes it. It's basically a hazard.

It has this strange delusion that a lot of bad sectors reported is a bad
disk, whereas it's quite normal for many devices to have a lot right from
when they were factory initialized. That in itself is fine, you always
get the number of actual sectors plus what the vendor deems as sufficient
spare capacity.

What actually matters is changes in these numbers, rising counts can
point to a problem.

Generally speaking the vendors tools are the most trustworthy as they
were produced by people with some view of how that drive firmware works,
and the next best seems to be the actual request to the drive for its own
opinion (as is often used by a BIOS if smart checks are enabled at boot)

Alan