[clintbradford]

I see MacNN recommended SMARTReporter today. Well, SMARTReporter caused me a little grief last month, as it claimed the two errors posted below on my MacBook Pro's hard drive.

But Drive Genius, Disk Warrior, and Tech Tools Pro detected no such errors.

Do we believe what the open source SMARTReporter reports? Or do we believe that the three top utilities used by professionals and labs tell us?

I went ahead and replaced the drive. But did SMARTReporter cause unnecessary grief?

Clint Bradford

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
D #5
Reallocated Sector Count
Flag 0x0033
Value - 100
Worst - 100
Threshold - 36
Type - Pre-Fail
Updated - Always
Failed - Never
Raw Value - 2

ID #190
AirFlow Temperature Celsius
Flag - 0x0022
Value - 50
Worst - 44
Threshold - 45
Type - Old age
Updated - Always
Failed - In the past
Raw value - 50
Min - 40
Max - 50

[ibook_steve]

SMART is an industry standard built into all hard drives' hardware from all manufacturers. Yes, I would definitely trust it over any third-party software utility. Software can only look at how the drive is behaving now, not in the past. SMART keeps track of prior small failures, just as your report here shows.

Steve

[besson3c]

Those errors look pretty insignificant. The first one wasn't actually marked as a failure, just notification of (I believe) some bad sectors that were blocked off, and the second one just related to the drive's temperature at that moment. It looks like SMARTreporter is showing you all of the stuff that is recorded big and small, whereas tools like Disk Utility just report on the fatal, show stopping problems. I would definitely not get overly concerned with errors such as the above, and next time I wouldn't bother replacing the drive unless you are getting fatal errors. It is normal for drives to get hot (and fans to compensate), sectors to go bad and be blocked off, etc.

[P]

SMART works by reporting 4 values: A raw value (somehting like seconds in operation or reallocated sectors), a normalized value of how good or bad that is (usually 100 or 200 for perfect), a base value for that normalized value to be compared to and a threshold value beyond which the drive should not be trusted. Because the conversion between the raw value and the normalized value is up to the manufacturer, SMART may not warn you early enough. For this reason, SMARTReporter can report any change in the raw value to let you judge for yourself.

In your case, 2 sectors have failed and been replaced with spares. Not a real problem, but keep an eye on it if it accelerates. Your drive has also run too hot at some point. 50C temperature is not terrible, but maybe the vents need cleaning if you never had it before.