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Is S.M.A.R.T. dumb?
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Stoneham, MA, USA
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Can anyone explain what's going on in this screen shot? Look close. Disk Utility tells my this hard drive is fine. SMART Utility, a 3rd party app that reads a drive's SMART data, tells me that this hard drive is failing with thousands of errors. Now, the thing is, I happen to know that this drive does/did have lots of bad blocks. A techtool scan showed hundreds of them. I zero'd the drive and it actually seems to be doing ok since then. There is no important data on this drive, nor do I intend to put any on there. But still, I always joke that SMART is useless and will even tell you a failing drive is OK. But if SMART data actually gives accurate data (as seen in SMART Utility), then why does Disk Utility (and TechTool for that matter) ALWAYS report no SMART problems, on any drives, ever. In all my years of Mac repair, I think I've only seen one drive that reported SMART problems. This, with hundreds of failed and failing drives.
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Oct 2001
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"That plane's dustin' crops where there ain't no crops."
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: planning a comeback !
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Correct title: Is DIsk Utility's S.M.A.R.T. status dumb?
-t
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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Originally Posted by l008com 
Can anyone explain what's going on in this screen shot? Look close. Disk Utility tells my this hard drive is fine. SMART Utility, a 3rd party app that reads a drive's SMART data, tells me that this hard drive is failing with thousands of errors.
The screenshots are consistent. The drive has not failed yet. Disk Utility lacks granularity.
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Administrator  Join Date: May 2000
Location: California
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SMART does not always detect failures before they happen. According to a report Google gave, less than half their failed drives gave even a single SMART warning before they died. And Disk Utility gives optimistic appraisals of the data, while SMART Reporter does pessimistic assessments.
Your drive may die even if SMART says it's fine. If Disk Utility reports the drive is failing, your drive WILL die, and you should salvage your data ASAP. In the mean time, maintain backups. Don't have backups? tsk, tsk. Start setting money aside for professional data recovery services, a few thousand should be enough. Or get an external TM backup drive, should cost less than a hundred.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Virginia
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Originally Posted by turtle777
Correct title: Is DIsk Utility's S.M.A.R.T. status dumb?
-t
I think I'd have titled it "Is Disk Utility S.M.A.R.T. D.U.M.B.?" just to confuse people.
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Moderator  Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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We had a discussion about just this issue not long ago. The way it works is that SMART reports three things: A raw value, a normalized value between 0 and 255 (where perfect is usually 100 or 200) and a threshold value. When the normalized value drops below threshold, a SMART utility will warn you, but the algorithm that converts the raw value to the normalized value is different for each manufacturer. This means that a drive can report a value of "100" every time, if the manufacturer choses to do so. Disk Utility can't do anything about that. Can you get the raw SMART output from that application of yours, so we can see what the normalized value is?
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The low-end Mac Pro is the most overpriced Mac since the IIvx
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