HDD condition report

Question

I am new to Ubuntu and I'm using a HDD plugged into the optical drive shaft and sometimes I get errors, regarded by the community as errors with bad SATA cable and power supply. I've scanned my HDD with GSmart control tool and got the following output:

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   119   099   006    Pre-fail  Always        -       202850112
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0023   100   099   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1114
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002f   081   060   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       135948945
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       2779
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0033   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       589
183 Runtime_Bad_Block       0x0032   019   019   000    Old_age   Always       -       81
 184 End-to-End_Error        0x0033   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
188 Command_Timeout         0x0032   100   096   000    Old_age   Always       -       8590065937
189 High_Fly_Writes         0x003a   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   060   057   045    Old_age   Always       -       40 (Min/Max 35/41)
191 G-Sense_Error_Rate      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       46
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       3
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   081   081   000    Old_age   Always       -       38019
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   040   043   000    Old_age   Always       -       40 (0 17 0 0 0)
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   199   000    Old_age   Always       -       312
254 Free_Fall_Sensor        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

As I am a newbie I would be extremely grateful if someone could explain to me how to interpret this output and what am I supposed to do. Thank you.

Answer 1

That is SMART data that is used for drive self-diagnosis. You can find good explanation on how to interpret it here (take a look at the other answers too):

• Value: This is the raw value that the controller reports. Usually it's an easy to understand value (like power on hours or temperature), but sometimes it isn't (like the read error rate). Different manufacturers can use different structures and meanings for this data.
• Normalized: This is the above value normalized so a higher value is always better. So a 114 in read/error rates is better than 113. Again, how your hard drive converts raw data to normalized value is vendor specific.
• Worst: The worst normalized value that your driver had in the past (where 99 is likely the factory setting).
• Threshold: When the normalized value is lower than this value the driver is likely to fail.

As stated in the answer, normalized value should be above threshold value, and all the pre-fail attributes in your report seem to satisfy this condition. The only suspicious attribute to me is End-to-End_Error whose normalized value is close to its threshold value. But according to this:

This is a critical parameter. Degradation of this parameter may indicate imminent drive failure. Urgent data backup and hardware replacement is recommended.

You shouldn't worry - End-to-End_Error threshold value is purposefully set high, since it seems to indicate very dangerous issues with HDD - all End-to-End_Error values are just the same on my 6 months old WD Black which never caused any problems.

I have to note that the issue with re-spinning HDDs happened to me twice with two different HDDs - those HDDs now work fine, one got molex cable replaced and another got better external rack PSU - so it might be just an issue with power cabling or PSU.

But just in case, save this SMART report and rerun diagnostics after couple of weeks - just to check whether any pre-fail normalized value dropped - that might indicate worse problems than just power cabling issues.

Also, it would be great if you could test the drive on another PSU, just to make sure that it's providing enough juice - in my case, external rack didn't provide enough current on 12V rail and that was causing HDD to re-spin.