Question about SMART

[Petrus de Calguarium]

Paolo Galtieri wrote:

> I have 2 Seagate FreeAgent Go 1Tb drives.  These are portable drives
> that get their power through USB.  Both these drives are about 1 
year
> old.  Every time I login I get a notification that both these drives 
may
> be going bad.  The reason is too many bad sectors.  One drive is
> formatted as it originally came, i.e NTFS the other was reformatted 
as
> Ext4. I have checked both drives using Seagate's tools (in non
> 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.
> 
> Any thoughts/comments are appreciated.

I had the same problem with Smart. I had a nearly new drive and smart 
kept telling me that the drive was bad and they system refused to 
boot, throwing me into single user mode (I think it's called) to 
repair the problem. I could not boot unless I unmounted that drive. I 
ran scans on the drive and every diagnostic I knew of and there was 
nothing wrong with it. BIOS did not report errors and the BIOS also 
detects bad drives using smart.

What I did was to disable the smart daemon and rely on the BIOS' 
built-in smart. I have been using the drive for a number of years, 
now, without issue.