Is SMART really that dumb?

[Tom Horsley]

On Sat, 14 Mar 2015 21:56:46 -0400
Tom Horsley wrote:

> > # smartctl -x /dev/sdc
> > # parted /dev/sdc u s p  
> 
> It's a little long, so I uploaded it here:
> 
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7pVI_DKcKbySURleHpJSXdpZWs/view?usp=sharing

Time has passed, I had been thinking about making a raid1
array for the data on this disk anyway, so I went ahead
and got a couple of new disks and did that. Copied
everything off the disk with nary an I/O error appearing,
and after copying everything off it, it still said 8 pending
sectors. I guess that means no data in any file or directory
was associated with the bad sectors.

That left me free to experiment with this silly disk, so
I started copying /dev/zero to it, and several hours into
the zeroing, I got a log message about pending going back
to zero. I figured that means it reallocated the blocks
finally, but when I look at smartctl -a, I see this:

  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0

apparently there are no reallocated sectors, but the pending
and offline numbers have gone back to zero:

197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0

the one number that looks like some kind of error is

183 Runtime_Bad_Block       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1

but it said that before as well.

So, mostly I guess SMART is still confusing me, but maybe I can use
this disk for something non-critical now without filling the logs
with pending and offline error messages. (4TB of swap space
maybe :-).