JEFF WILSON.dev

July 12, 2007

HDD Health

I’ve been using some hard disk monitoring software to get reports from my hard drive about its health using “Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology” (SMART). Most HDDs support SMART. You can get reports about various errors, and get predictions of when the drive is expected to die. Right now, mine is predicted to die 3/8/2008 due to “power on hours.” However, I’m also concerned about my “raw read error rate.”

I’m using freeware HDD Health v2.1 build 159 from Panterasoft for my WindowsXP machine at work. I haven’t set up drive monitoring on my Ubuntu machine at home yet. HDD Health appears to work just fine. My only complaint is that my “raw read error rate” changes fairly often and everytime this value changes, a pop-up notification window appears. This can be a bit annoying.

This (dead link removed, see below) competing product website (costs money for their software) has an informative FAQ about SMART stats.

The Wikipedia article above has some suggestions for the most important metrics, but I think spin-up time should also be an important parameter to watch for, since it will possibly indicate failing motors/bearings. Finally, this Google paper has some interesting analysis of SMART statistics. One conclusion they made is that SMART stats are not accurate for predicting failure.