smartctl -l error /dev/... When to worry ?

[Randy Kelsoe]

Hannes Mayer wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> I just discovered smartctl and the interesting output with
> # smartctl -l error /dev/hda
>
> hda reports no errors (newest disk), but hdb and hdf do report some
> errors every few hours (see outputs below)
>
> When do I actually have to start to worry about errors ?
> I mean, is an error every few hours normal for older (1-2 years) disks ?
>
> ########################### hdb #################################
>
> smartctl version 5.21 Copyright (C) 2002-3 Bruce Allen
> Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
>
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
> SMART Error Log Version: 1
> Warning: ATA error count 60 inconsistent with error log pointer 3
>
> Error 60 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5386 hours
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was 
> active or idle.
> Error 59 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5386 hours
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was 
> active or idle.
> Error 58 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5386 hours
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was 
> active or idle.
> Error 57 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5385 hours
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was 
> active or idle.
> Error 56 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5375 hours
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was 
> active or idle.
>
I have trimmed the above errors to show that the most recent 5 errors on 
hdb were within 11 hours of each other. You need to look at a 'smartctl 
-a /dev/hdb |grep -i power_on' to get the current age of the disk, then 
compare it to the number of power-on hours when the error occurred. The 
above errors occurred when you drive was 224 days old, so they might be 
old errors, might have occurred during a power failure, etc.

You might also want to get a newer version of smartmontools. The latest 
is 5.32, and you are running 5.21.

> ######################## hdf #######################
>
> smartctl version 5.21 Copyright (C) 2002-3 Bruce Allen
> Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
>
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
> SMART Error Log Version: 1
> Warning: ATA error count 1486 inconsistent with error log pointer 5
> Error 1486 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5383 hours
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in 
> an unknown state.
> Error 1485 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5382 hours
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in 
> an unknown state.
>   Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
>   CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC   Timestamp  Command/Feature_Name
>   -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --   ---------  --------------------
>   08 00 00 01 00 00 b0 00     243.792  DEVICE RESET
>   ec 00 01 01 00 00 b0 00     237.072  IDENTIFY DEVICE
>   08 00 00 01 00 00 b0 00     220.016  DEVICE RESET
>   ec 00 01 01 00 00 b0 00     213.280  IDENTIFY DEVICE
>
> Error 1484 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5382 hours
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in 
> an unknown state.
>   Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
>   CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC   Timestamp  Command/Feature_Name
>   -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --   ---------  --------------------
>   08 00 00 01 00 00 b0 00     220.016  DEVICE RESET
>   ec 00 01 01 00 00 b0 00     213.280  IDENTIFY DEVICE
>
> Error 1483 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5381 hours
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in 
> an unknown state.
>   Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
>   CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC   Timestamp  Command/Feature_Name
>   -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --   ---------  --------------------
>   08 00 00 01 00 00 b0 00     220.000  DEVICE RESET
>   ec 00 01 01 00 00 b0 00     213.264  IDENTIFY DEVICE
>
> Error 1482 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 5368 hours
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in 
> an unknown state.
>   Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
>   CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC   Timestamp  Command/Feature_Name
>   -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --   ---------  --------------------
>   08 00 00 01 00 00 b0 00     220.000  DEVICE RESET
>   ec 00 01 01 00 00 b0 00     213.264  IDENTIFY DEVICE
>
> #################################################

See a theme here? What device do or did you have as the master device on 
the IDE bus with this drive? This looks like a device on the bus had a 
problem, and the system tried to recover by resetting devices on the 
bus. If you have a CDROM drive on the same bus, and it had problems, you 
might see something like this in your error logs. Again, do the 
'smartctl -a /dev/hdf | grep -i power_on' and compare the age of the 
drive to when the error occurred.