Sid Spry wrote: > On Tue, Jun 23, 2020, at 11:38 AM, Grant Edwards wrote: >> Which is better than not knowing until the drive is failed and >> offline. :) >> > But redundant if the drive degration is obvious. In two cases I > can think of drives only reported SMART will-fail after the drives > had hard failed. In the other cases performance was so degraded > it was obvious it was the drive. > >
I've had two hard drive failures that SMART warned me about. If not for SMART I wouldn't have noticed the drives having issues until much later. Maybe even after losing a lot of data. In both of those cases, I lost no data at all. I was able to recover everything off the drive. SMART can't predict the future so it can only monitor for the things it can see. If say a spindle bearing is about to lock up suddenly, SMART most likely can't detect that since it is a hardware failure that can't really be predicted. We may be able to hear a strange sound if we lucky but if it happens suddenly, it may not even do that. While SMART can't predict all points of failures, it can detect a lot of them. Even if the two drives I had failed with no warning from SMART, I'd still run it and monitor it. Using SMART can warn you in certain situations. If a person doesn't run SMART, they will miss those warnings. SMART isn't perfect but it is better than not having it all. Dale :-) :-)
