On 2010/04/02 11:54, Vincent wrote: > Hi folks, > > One of my servers has a problem with its harddrive. To receive a warning on > harddrive failures, I usually have the following as a cronjob: > /sbin/atactl /dev/wd0c smartstatus >> /dev/null 2>&1 > The output of /sbin/atactl /dev/wd0c smartstatus on that server is: No SMART > threshold exceeded
This issues SMART RETURN STATUS, and checks the return code from the drive. http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/project/d1321r3-ATA-ATAPI-5.pdf see section 8.41.7 (type '218g' if you're reading in mupdf..) The drive is meant to make an intelligent decisions based on it's own interpretation of the attributes as to what return code it should use for this. If this comes back clean, the drive thinks that it is ok. > However, if i use: /sbin/atactl /dev/wd0c readattr > I receive this: > Attributes table revision: 16 > ID Attribute name Threshold Value Raw > 1 Raw Read Error Rate 16 100 > 0x000000000000 > 2 Throughput Performance 50 100 0x000000000000 > 3 Spin Up Time 24 120 > 0x000300a600a5 > 4 Start/Stop Count 0 100 > 0x00000000001b > 5 *Reallocated Sector Count 5 1 0x00000000075b > 7 Seek Error Rate 67 100 > 0x000000000000 > ... > One or more threshold values exceeded! This does a SMART READ DATA and SMART READ THRESHOLD (not in the version of the spec in the pdf I found; register value 0xD1) and makes a simple comparison of the values. > I had a look at atactl.c and noticed, that the threshold check is completely > different! [1] I don't see a problem with this. In one you're asking the drive to carry out one specific command and return the result; in the other you're asking it to carry out a different command and return the result (the threshold comparison in that one is something extra atactl does). The main value I place in the SMART commands is that they let you do some basic tests so you can decide if it's worth rebooting to run the vendor tools if you want to return a drive...
