Before getting into the output here is my typical experience with SMART, there is what I call a "bad disk" with pending and uncorrectable sectors that cannot be reallocated. It has caused a kernel panic and system crash repeatedly as we can see from the logs. But SMART says it has "PASSED" its self assessment. SMART is still useful to me but it is more about looking at Current_Pending_Sector. Any time I have had anything but 0 for that attribute it........

Another new drive bad from the start: Jun 2 15:14:18 one-desktop kernel: [15895.386779] ata2.00: exception Emask 0x50 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x280900 action 0x6 frozen Jun 2 15:14:18 one-desktop kernel: [15895.386782] ata2.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface fatal error Jun 2 15:14:18 one-desktop kernel: [15895.386784] ata2: SError: { UnrecovData HostInt 10B8B BadCRC } Jun 2 15:14:18 one-desktop kernel: [15895.386788] ata2.00: cmd 60/0........

This is just trying to read 5GB off the drive with dd and the drive initially tested ok but shortly after I wondered why I was seeing 2MB/s read speeds. Notice the "current_pending_sector", anytime I've seen it at anything above 0 even with no other bad fields/attributes, it means the drive is bad. ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x3 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED ata1.00: cmd 60/00:00:........

Here's a proven example of what a bad hard drive can do, it was technically functioning OKin a RAID array but the system became extremely low and the load become high and IOWAIT was even higher and I always thought it was a bad application. The truth is that this failing 1TBHitachi has slowly gotten worse and caused huge slowdowns, (eg. 100% load on Thunderbird waiting for e-mails to load etc..). After swapping it out, tabs change instantly, emails are not lagged, and........

I like dd, although it only reads it, usually a read test of the entire disk will uncover if your hard drive is bad in some parts. This is a good thing to do at least once a month, a lot of times bizarre program behavior, laginess and crashing/unnmounting problems etc.. are due to a failing disc and SMART won't know it or indicate a problem: We must also remember there's never a guarantee, I've found that ever since we moved to larger and more platters per drive with 1TB drives........

I had a dying drive that smart thought until it totally disappeared was a good drive, and actually all parameters did look fine but this system was causing my system to lockup and other bad behavior: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 Serial Number: WD-WMAZ20139 Firmware Version: 50.0AB50 User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes Device........

I had one of these shipped and it was not recognized when plugged in, here's what a dead drive looks like (I assume it's teh circuit board which is dead): ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) ata1: softreset failed (device not ready) ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) ata1: link online but device misclassified, retrying ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0) ata1: softreset f........

Let the numbers speak for themselves, from what I read the Load_Cycle_Count which is very high (more than 500,000/half a million times) is the number of head parks. What a stupid"Green" design and design flaw which will probably mean an early life for the drive. This is almost as silly as Seagate's new reputation for BSY/poor quality disks since the 7200.11 series. To make it worse this is also when Western Digital introduced "Advanced Format" o........

This drive is clearly on the way out, the Kernel knows it but I'm surprised that SMART is not concerned. I didn't blame Seagate for their past issues until now. This hard drive has hardly been used and has not even been powered on for a year according to SMART. Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Device........

Seagate Inventory/Firmware Check I heard about this issue a long time ago but never looked into it. I figured I wasn't affected since my 500GB drives were running for so long. I've been using Seagate's since 2002 and to this day all of the drives I have are alive from Seagate. *Update the bad news is that I realize one of my 500GB's is about to die, it's not even a year old, but is also not affected by the recall according to Seagate! Seagate Inventory/Firm........